I have been experimenting recently with Twitter, the latest fad in interruptive technology. Oops. Have I already revealed my opinion? Well, yeah, as a social tool, Twitter has a serious downside, but if applied narrowly, it also has two potentially useful applications. What follows is my exploration of each of these three perspectives.
Twitter as Microblogging
When used specifically to communicate to others, Twitter falls into the category of applications that I would call Microblogging. Social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us and Connotea, moblogging, and Amazon sidebars are are other examples, but Twitter may be even less demanding than these. You don’t even have have a link to any deeper content. It’s much like any destination blogging community. It’s got built in aggregation, a range of lightweight clients, RSS feeds, and so on. It’s blogging with a 140 character limit on posts and a single question that in theory captures its main topical focus: What are you doing?
You can familiarize yourself with the overall feel of the kinds of posts that are generated by looking at the Public Timeline, an aggregation of all the most recent posts. (By most recent, I mean really recent, as in the last few seconds.) The pubic timeline isn’t the point, of course, but it reveals a distinct effort on the part of the users of Twitter to communicate their opinion, to charm, and to otherwise express their distinctive voice. In other words, just like blogging.
In addition, you see clear indication of people using Twitter as a kind of chat interface, which is perhaps just another indication of how everything evolves (or degrades) to resemble email. As you see from the meme, quiz, and mood blogs on places like Livejournal, Twitter’s laudable effort to further reduce the barrier to communication leads to a lot more noise. Or at least, a lot more content whose purpose is purely social – empty conversation between friends. I have no objection to empty conversation between friends, so long as l can keep my own participation to a minimum. I have a very short “ok, I’m wasting my life now” fuse.
But this does raise the first of my concerns about Twitter as microblogging. Because of its aggregation model, if I want to tune into my friends’ posts, I have to accept the fact that there will be a lot of noise to wade through. Fortunately, each unit of noise is less than 140 characters long.
The far greater concern is how the frequency of updates and the compelling nature of social connections creates an addictive source of interruptions. Does that concept sound familiar to you? It’s a dynamic that informs our interaction with the Internet in general and there are literally millions of applications and services that make it worse. Ho often do you check your email? Read RSS feeds? Check your favorite blogs? Get interrupted by system notifications or instant messages? There is good research into this that I won’t go into here, but we all know it’s a major problem. As the size of Twitter networks increases, this problem will only get worse.
It’s easy to invent another system to interrupt us and send us even more information. What we really need is trusted systems that will intelligently postpone, aggregate, and otherwise filter out interruptions and information. (I have some ideas about that, which I’ll share another time.) But until then, Twitter scares me.
Twitter as Timelog
I’ve taught time management courses of one kind or another for many years. The topic retains a considerable interest for me in large part because of its potential role in nurturing mindfulness at work. Most time management systems (with the important exceptions of my own work in the nineties and David Allen’s phenomenal Getting Things Done approach in recent years) focus on increasing the pressure on you, rather than freeing your mind for the task in front of you.
How you spend your time is how you spend your life. Consequently, one of the most important elements of any good personal system for mindfulness about work is a brutally honest assessment of where your time actually goes. Twitter can play a role in this.
There are scores of fine tools out there for logging how you spend your time. One of the key elements is good sampling, such as writing down what you are doing every six minutes (or some other number) or noting each time you transition between tasks. But after working with hundreds of people on this, I’ve discovered it’s very difficult to stick to this, even through a single day. There are several powerful emotional reasons for this, but there are some practical ones as well. Logging how you spend your time can be seen as yet another interruption, for one thing. (Though some people see it as a kind of focusing exercise, which is really a lovely way to look at it.) Another is the lack of a convenient interface that sits within your regular work environment. And another is the need for some kind of timer or other reminder to actually make the log entry. Twitter can help with all of these.
To use Twitter as a timelog, you need three things in place, two of which are part of a common environment for working with Twitter. First, you need the most convenient possible interface for making your own Twitter posts. This is probably not their web interface, but rather one of the standalone widgets or applications that can pop up at a moment’s notice with the focus already in the post entry box.
Second, you need a reminder system so that you enter posts at regular intervals. Posting only when you have something to share is to fall prey to Twitter as a social tool, not as a timelog tool. Interestingly, with the right number and mix of Twitter friends whose updates you monitor, you could use the Twitter client itself as a timelog reminder, so long as you were willing to be scrupulously honest about what you were doing right that moment. That, of course, is hardly a trivial problem to overcome. We have a hard enough time being honest with ourselves about where our time goes, let alone sharing that information with others. Instead, I recommend desktop timers or cron jobs or other such dependable solutions for popping up a reminder every set number of minutes. Better yet, it should pop up your Twitter client.
Third, you need to actually reflect upon how you spent your time. An environment separate from Twitter’s, in which you subscribe to your own RSS feed, would suffice for showing you your own timelog posts. I do wish that there was a way to simply download a text file of your own Twitter posts, without having to do any excess text manipulation. What you do with this information – how you use it to change your own work life – is the subject of another exploration.
Twitter for Teams
I’ve done a fair amount of research and writing on the topic of virtual work teams. One of the most frequently cited issues is the problem of presence. There are all sorts of benefits to working in the same physical space. You pick up on the momentum of a group of people who are busy working on their own tasks. (This is one of the reasons people like to go work in cafes, even among strangers.) You can tell how open someone is to being interrupted. You can have tiny little ad hoc meetings to deal with places where you might be stuck.
Many of us try to shoehorn some of these needs into our use of a combination of instant messaging clients and email. This can give us a bit of that ad hoc meeting benefit, provided people are actually available for them. But unless people manage their “away” messages very judiciously, we rarely have a good idea of how busy or focused someone is. And managing status messages of that sort is inconvenient enough that few people do it well enough to be useful to virtual team members.
Twitter could play a role in both providing the status information of presence and in creating a little bit of that sense of work momentum that you get when you’re in a room of busy colleagues. For the purposes of communicating status, my recommendation would be to use one of several new tools that feed your latest Twitter post into your instant messaging client as your current status. That way, your colleagues don’t have to read every Twitter post as it comes in, but only have to glance at their IM client to see if you are interruptible.
For a taste of shared work momentum, it would be important to configure Twitter as a closed group of all your core colleagues but only your core colleagues. In other words, each member of the team should subscribe to the Twitter posts of every other member, but not those of anyone else.
One of the fascinating things about Twitter as a tool for teams is that, when combined with some of the timelog methods I described above, it begins to create a gentle environment for group accountability. No, we’re not honest about how we’re spending our time, But when everyone is reporting on the task before them at regular polling intervals, people will be reminded to turn their attention to the things that matter to the team. This would be interesting stuff to study.
Conclusion
As a source of even more social interruption, Twitter is problem. Unfortunately, that aspect will probably overwhelm the other benefits. I see Twitter as another Blackberry, interrupting people who are in the midst of other tasks or even other conversations in a way that undermines deeper connection with our work and with each other. The image of people wandering around a conference checking on what their Twitter friends are doing kind of disturbs me.
As a tool for mindfulness and group cohesion, I think Twitter or systems like it could be a valuable asset. It would have to be applied with discipline and it might not be as addictive as its broader social application, but ultimately that could be a very good thing indeed.
