I do occasionally get into that 'checking Twitter every five minutes' state - 'Please, help me avoid my work.' I have a writing room for when I get completely out of control, so I can put myself out of the Internet's reach.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break.
I tend to write three to four hours a day, depending - oftentimes very late at night. When I write on Twitter, I do other things: I'm working, grading, or reading, and I'm procrastinating, and I'll pop on Twitter and be like, 'Hey, what's up? Yogurt's delicious.'
Twitter is so short, it's safe. I don't want my bosses to be like, 'Hey, your script is due and we saw you wrote four blog pages.'
I'm not a crazy Twitter guy to where I'm tweeting out stuff every day, and rarely even once a week do I tweet. But I mean, occasionally, I read some stuff.
Twitter is the limit of me putting myself out there.
While I know that Twitter is doing just fine with or without my 140-character contributions, I also know that people are fickle, and when using something becomes too annoying, they stop.
If you need five minutes every hour to look at tweets or to just surf the Internet, you need to schedule that into your schedule, allow yourself to do that. Because when people start procrastinating, what they've done is, they've tried to ignore that urge. They try to deny themselves time on Facebook or time surfing the web.
I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.
The first thing I do is I check my emails and my texts. I guess I shouldn't feel guilty about it at this point; it's kind of the norm. Sometimes I'll bounce around Twitter. And if I have time, I'll catch up on the news, usually on 'Huffington Post' or 'Salon.'
I can't do Twitter or Facebook, mostly because I feel like I'm the type of person who has to regiment the amount of time I spend doing certain things or I'll just wade in it, and then I'll never come out.