How to Curb Your Twitter Addiction
Every year, for at least the past four years, I’ve decided to spend less time on Twitter.
After trying and testing many different ways to avoid visiting the site this year (including an electric shock bracelet ), I think I finally figured it out.
If you also don’t want to use Twitter this year, here’s what I learned and can recommend.
Treat Twitter as a write-only service
If you want to continue using Twitter as a 280-character microblogging platform, for personal or professional reasons, it’s pretty easy to treat Twitter as a write-only service.
In other words: Twitter is where you tweet, not read other people’s tweets.
Applications such as Twizzle, allow to write tweets directly from the line menu without opening the Twitter application and without the distraction of the tape; you can also tweet directly from your Twitter profile page without viewing anyone’s tweets.
I currently use Twitter exclusively through my profile page. I can tweet, view notifications, and reply as needed – and while Twitter still shows me tempting distractions like popular topics, I’m stubborn enough to open a new tab and search for topic keywords if I really want to know. , what’s happening. (After all, it’s best to get news from reputable sources.)
Follow Twitter feeds with RSS reader
If you want to spend as little time on Twitter as possible, but still want to follow a few select Twitter feeds, you have several options.
First, you can narrow your subscription list down to the only channels you want to read.
Second, you can leave your follow-up list as is and create / bookmark a private Twitter list of people you are really interested in.
I tried both of these methods, but neither worked as well as the third option I found, which was to load multiple Twitter feeds into my RSS reader.
Viewing tweets through Feedly’s simple black and white interface gives me the information I need in chronological order (a huge plus) and removes the impulse to endless scrolling. After all, once you’ve cleared your RSS reader, there is nothing to read – and it’s time to get back to work.
Batch and time-limited on social media
Before I switched to reading tweets through Feedly, I tried several different methods of time limiting on social media.
I started by telling myself that I have 15 minutes of social media (reading and writing) a day, tracked through RescueTime .
But when you can crawl Twitter feed in seconds, those 15 minutes can still take up a huge chunk of your day, so I was still in the “do something, check social, do something, check social” loop. …
Then I told myself that I can only check Twitter in the morning; Once I start my work day, I will have to leave the site (unless I use it for work) until the next morning.
This worked a little better as the boundaries of “when I was using Twitter” and “when I was not using Twitter” were clear – and I would recommend this as a solution to anyone who also has problems limiting their use of social media.
Let someone else collect the best tweets for you
If you want to stay on top of the latest news without falling into the endless, disturbing assumptions that social media can simultaneously provide, apps like Nuzzel can send you notifications when your friends start tweeting about the same news or hot topic. Nuzzel is also great if you want to keep abreast of those industry discussions that may not reach the mainstream news sites or, when they do, may end up being severely curtailed.
And if you want to stay away from Twitter but still want to keep up to date with the latest viral tweets and memes (for personal or professional reasons), check back on BuzzFeed every few days or so and you’ll be up to date with everything worth catching up to. on the.
Or, if you only want to receive lists of the “funniest tweets this week,” without being distracted by the rest of the BuzzFeed quizzes, videos, and lengthy journalism, you can set up your RSS reader to collect all BuzzFeed posts containing the words “funniest tweets”.
Which I will do this afternoon.