Daily Archives: May 13, 2008

Twitter is a tool I have been exploring lately and thinking about how it can be put to practical use. Twitter asks the question: What are you doing? But the answer to that question can be more than just what you are eating for lunch or watching on television. Rather, the question could be: What are you doing in your life? What are you accomplishing? Stop and observe — be in this moment.

By giving you the opportunity to pause and think about the answers to these questions, Twitter becomes a tool for getting focused. The brevity of a Twitter post — no more than 140 characters — forces you to finely craft what you want to say. But the immediacy of Twitter forces you to write and post quickly, usually within seconds. The net effect is to pull your thoughts into the present moment, to focus completely on what you are doing right now.

Here’s how to put this to work:

• Tweet before starting a new task. State what you hope to accomplish with the task — the goal or the result you are looking for. This will help you focus on that end result before beginning work and prevent flailing around, searching for a purpose behind what you are doing.

• Tweet after finishing a task. State what you have accomplished. This will force you to take a moment and consider whether you accomplished what you set out to do or achieved the desired result. Is there anything left to do before the task can be considered complete?

• Stop what you are doing and tweet at random points in the day. This will help bring your consciousness to the present moment, to what is happening in your world right then. Tweet your observations only. When you look back on your archive, you will have a log of these moments that would have otherwise passed you by. InnerTwitter is a tool that can help you with this.

In the future, I will try to follow all three of these suggestions. Feel free to come and follow me.

How are you using Twitter?