Are you a Twitter user?
Are you overwhelmed by your news feed on a daily (or even hourly) basis?
After a long time, I begrudgingly started using Twitter. My profile says I joined in 2008 but it was probably a few years after that when I started to see the benefits.
I wouldn’t tweet myself but I was getting a lot of great information from a lot of different sites. The world was my oyster!
In the middle of last year, I took a step back and realized that I was following about 200 twitter handles. The accounts I was following ranged from my favorite sports teams, to software I use, to random news sites.
My twitter account’s feed was now pumping out more stuff than one could take in, regardless of the short character count allowed.
I was spending more time on Twitter to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important.
I was overwhelmed.
Worse, everything had the same priority. There was no ability to focus on what was important.
Something had to change.
Use a Twitter List to increase your focus on what’s important
My simple solution was this.
Twitter has a feature where you can organize twitter accounts into lists. So I created a list called ‘Focus.’
This new dedicated Twitter Focus list includes only those accounts that I deem important for me to stay current with at a particular point in time.
Those currently include:
- New software that I’m trying out
- A few favorite productivity and efficiency accounts
- Software / tools that I use frequently
- People that inspire me
As I write this, I now follow a total of 72 tweeters but only have 24 members in my Focus list.
During the course of the day, I only watch that Focus list.
When I have some free time to kill, I will look at my full feed. Perhaps it’s at lunch or in the evening when I’m winding down and relaxing.
Can you do the same?