My Twitter detox

Decluttering, detoxing, rationalising... however you want to put it, January is traditionally a time for taking a look at your life and clearing out some of the rubbish. I usually try to do a bit of decluttering shortly after taking down the Christmas decorations, but I also tend to look again at how I’m spending my time. I want to rid myself of temporal as well as spatial clutter.

And what do I spend too much time on? Twitter. I like it because the brevity of each tweet allows you to dip in and out for five minutes at a time. Perfect if, like me, you work a lot from home and you want some human interaction during your breaks or downtime. But if you’re not careful, you can spend way too much time on there, reading and chatting, and that gets in the way of real work.

I don’t want to quit Twitter; I just want to limit the amount of time I spend on there. So I’ve created my own Twitter detox plan.

Step 1

Install Leechblock. This Firefox plugin lets you choose sites to block and when to block them. (Lifehacker has a good explanation of how it works in practice.) I’ve set it up so that I can only use Twitter for a maximum of 60 minutes each weekday. I’ve also time-limited other sites I might be tempted to spend hours reading, divided into custom categories like “Funny stuff” and “Girly fluff”. You can set your own categories depending on what your personal time-suckers are.

But if you do get “only” an hour a day on Twitter (or 15 minutes, or whatever you choose), you want that time to be quality time. So...

Step 2

Use the Twitcleaner app to clean up the list of people you’re following. It analyses behaviours and picks out people who are silent, who repeat themselves a lot, who do various spammy-looking things. Then it gives you a report and you can decide which ones to unfollow. Mass unfollowing makes the Twitter API unhappy, but Twitcleaner will manage the process so that your unfollowing happens gradually (though from your point of view, it’s all done and dusted in one go).

If you’re still in a detoxy mood, you can also try

Step 3

Use Twitblock to clean up the list of people who follow you. It’s satisfying knowing you’re helping to clean up Twitter by reporting the spammers, though it doesn’t really save you any time directly.

Then it’s time for the all-important final step.

Step 4:

Step away from the computer. Pour yourself a large glass of wine and/or open a box of chocolates. After all, what's the point of freeing up your time if you don't spend at least some of it enjoying yourself?