Follow Me on Twitter—or Not

I got myself on Twitter (the microblogging platform) a little over a month ago. It's a great place to connect with other people with ADD! A great place to find links to information about ADD—and everything else! A great place to spend hours without even noticing!

I invite you to follow me on Twitter (I'm kathwriter). But first, you might want to read this blog post by ADD coach Robert Gordon: "Twitter is Great for ADHDers. But Proceed with Caution." (By the way, I found Gordon and his blog on Twitter.)

I'm not spending as much time wandering on Twitter as I did at first. Here's what's helped me manage my tweeting time so far:

• I downloaded TweetDeck, a sort of browser for Twitter. I set up a group for people I follow who have an interest in ADD, and I set up a search for the hashtag #adhd. So I can check out tweets in just those two columns, minimizing the risk of getting pulled in by links to photos of Gaudí's Sagrada Familia, a webcam of peregrine falcon chicks, or an interview with Dolly Parton.

• I turned off TweetDeck's notification sounds, so they don't pull me in when I've minimized TweetDeck. (And so they don't interrupt online guided meditations!) I definitely don't have Twitter running all the time on some corner of my desktop.  

• I favorite messages with links I might want to check out, instead of following all interesting links immediately. (That's what really gets me into trouble!) So I haven't  lost the links to the peregrine falcons or Dolly Parton, even though I haven't checked them out yet.

• I let go of the urge to be thorough and not miss anything. Well, I'm working on that one.

Comments

[Jerrie Hurd]

Managing time with all the e-mail and social media is a problem for anyone and everyone who is trying to maintain an on-line presence. Can eat you up--timewise.

[Shari Phiel]

I'm just wondering how much micro-blogging and social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are contributing to ADD. I don't have ADD, but even I have found myself flitting from tweet to tweet, snurl to snurl. Yet I'm constantly battling with my editor at the newspaper where I work - she wants to shorten articles and I want them longer - because I worry that by shortening news stories from an average of 800 words to 500 and now 300 words, we're just feeding into a culture of ever diminishing attention spans. I could google research on ADD and the Internet, but I would probably get distracted by some viral video on YouTube.