Twitter Experiment

I've been very hesitant to use Twitter. I'm skeptical about its usefulness and value to others. Who wants to know how I spend every minute of the day? What are people missing all around them while they tweet and IM? If I saw a hummingbird, I'd want to tweet my mom (if she used it) but would I miss the hummingbird in the first place because I was tweeting that I just finished sweeping the patio?

I asked myself: Should you use a tool just because all the cool people do it? (See video of Stewart and Colbert below.) I don't know anyone who uses it on a regular basis, so I would be tweeting into the void half the time anyway.

And I wonder what it does to the attention span. Then I started to think about how fragmented my attention span has been lately. I need to become more aware and strategic about how I spend my work time. I let email interrupt me constantly and and go on these interesting but unproductive voyages when I Google—sometimes I have to remind myself where I started. I read many books without recording the gems I find therein.

So I thought I'd make those observations the basis of my experience. Every so often, I'll have a Twitter day in which I keep track of all the shifts in my mental gears for the purpose of studying the effectiveness of my habits. And when I read or travel the Web, I'll use Twitter to capture the gems I find quickly.