THE DREAM IN ACTION

image via Robert Scoble’s flickr

Over the past 2 months I’ve made some drastic changes to how I use Twitter (which I will share below). When I was in China, as I was reading The 4 Hour Work Week, I realized that my control over my own productivity was slipping from my hands. I spent so much time on non-productive tasks and it was time for a drastic change. I realized that my Twitter habits were guilty of productivity theft and I needed to put an end to it. Here’s the experiment…

Before

At one point, I was following 1001 people on Twitter. At home on my Mac I used Tweetdeck and REACH to manage my twitter followers. The constant flow of Tweets was entertaining for sure but because of my desire to see as much as I could from the “Twittersphere” I dropped other important tasks. At work I limited Twitter but used iGoogle’s Betwittered to follow the streams. It got to the point that I couldn’t even see the Tweets from people I knew personally because of the huge number of people I followed that I didn’t know but were just interesting to me.

I have always been a huge fan of taking Twitter relationships offline. Late last year I met Ross Kimbarovsky, founder of crowdSPRING via Twitter. We had dinner one night and now have a solid, offline friendship. Same goes for Steffan Antonas, a WordPress & Twitter guru out in San Diego. When I was home I met Steffan for drinks and we now stay in touch, sometimes via Twitter and sometimes via email. Another example is Fraser Kelton, VP of BizDev for AdaptiveBlue (maker of GLUE), who I’ll be meeting up with in two weeks on my trip to NYC. These are just a few examples of many more!

There are some incredibly valuable relationships to be had out there and I’ll always love Twitter for making those relationships easier to develop and find. But it got to the point that I couldn’t separate the social networking from the social noise making. I didn’t want to lose the ability to develop those relationships into valuable ones only because I was trying to keep up with so many other people I’d never met.

Realization

As I realized that I had to make this change I first had to decide how. Another relationship that I’ve begun to nurture through Twitter is the founder of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur. I follow his blog closely and saw him post on his drastic change in Twitter usage.  He had the Twitter folks write a script that would “unfollow all”. He did this because his direct messages got out of control. He was following 23,o00 people and understandably it was overbearing. 

I realized that I wanted to take a similar action. My goal was to get back to my close friends and people I’d met in person. I wanted to see the random actions, “I fed my dog ice cream and he loved it”, from my friends (so I could later make fun of them) but I didn’t need to see these posts from everyone. So how would I do that? What would the affects be and how could I test before making the jump?

Change

In China I basically didn’t use Twitter. This was my test. I think I had a total of 10-15 posts the entire month and it was relaxing. It freed me to focus on what I was learning from my training courses and it freed me to explore China. I reduced my blog posting to ‘travel only’, and I focused on the experiences I was having. I felt freed, I felt focused, and much more productive. I knew that when I got back I needed to apply some of the Tim Ferriss (4HWW) principles to really change my productivity and focus. I would employ the low(er) information diet.

So, when I got back, I promptly got in touch with Loic and asked if he could share the script with me. He couldn’t give me the script but I got in touch with Zac Bowling (@zbowling) and he ran it for me. In a total of about 20 minutes I was following O people. I had completely started from scratch with Twitter and it was scary. I started re-adding people like my parents (yes, they’re on Twitter), my sisters, my college friends, the people who I stated above, and other people that I knew in person. It was easy to find who I communicated with most often using saved Twitter searches in REACH (coming to beta soon!). 

I definitely do need to apologize to some people because I haven’t yet added everyone back that I should. I’m doing this gradually. If I know you in person I’m probably following you (again). However, for those who I don’t know in person I’ve limited my consumption of your tweets to regain my personal productivity. Please don’t take it personally. If we have had conversations, please @reply me and get back in touch, I’d love it. I should say that there is no goal here of having a ridiculous follower/following ratio. I could careless. I only care about the value that I get out of the tool and I’ll take almost any action that will increase that value measure.

After

The results of my experiment have been pretty interesting. Right away I lost about 150 followers. It dropped from 1500 followers to about 1340. Losing those followers didn’t bother me at all. If people are following me only/just because I’m following them then peace. Then, people started following me at a much faster rate and even though I’d lose about 10 followers a day, I’d add about 11. Now my follower number is about 1360 and I sincerely hope to interact with many of those people in the future.

Twitter is very much a two way street. Those who interact with my question type tweets I’ll follow and interact with them, those who don’t, well I guess they’ll continue to just follow my tweets. I definitely engaged in the question tweets of anyone who @replies me or that I’m already following. I’m a huge supporter of the platform and now that my Tweets go directly and quickly into Facebook it’s engaging even more friends!

My productivity has sky-rocketed due to my low information diet and reduction of Tweets to consume. Now I rarely consume Tweets and send Tweets at the same time. By doing this it’s easy to spiral into a Twitter session that lasts much longer than it needs to. I can’ t say I’d recommend this experiment to everyone, but I would recommend identifying what and who are important to you and making sure that the tool enables better communication instead of the tool becoming a barrier to solid communication. 

Below is a hilarious video about the “Twittershere” shared by my sis @taylorgraves