A Twitter Time Management Experiment

Are you following me on Twitter?

If you are one of my followers, then you likely have observed a few things:

• I make an effort to respond to every tweet,
• I tweet a lot,
• I haven't automated anything on Twitter (even followbacks I manually do now),
• and if you've had exchanges with me, you'll see I rarely am able to tweet in real time

As my follower base has increased and along with it, the incoming tweet load, I've run into a few problems:

• Although I'm typically "light" on Twitter, I do take business seriously. There are often full days where I am on overload with work which prevents me from spending any time on Twitter. Since I work on the Internet, I also like taking downtime entirely away from the computer. Both of these things mean it is easy for me to get behind in responding to tweets. I've been as much as 2 weeks behind in responses at some points!
• When I get far behind, I often have to resort to using search rather than Tweetdeck for responses. This means missing tweets from those tweeps who don't appear in search entirely.
• For productivity purposes, it makes more sense for me - on those days I am able to tweet - to spend 1 or 2 solid chunks of time responding to tweets. The issue here is that I don't want to flood the stream of followers with responses. Also, Twitter has implemented a time-out period where if you tweet too much in a given time, you are unable to tweet for an hour (and sometimes more).
• I've not been able to look as much at the streams of my friends because of time limitations.
• I love live interactions/exchanges with people but with getting behind all the time in responses, it's rare that I'm able to engage in "real-time" like I used to.

For those of you that know me from Twitter or have been one of my coaching clients, you'll know that my philosophy has been to avoid automation. It defeats what is at the heart of social networking and social media. At the same time, the way I have been handling things simply isn't working for me. Twitter has turned more into a chore for me and something I have to do rather than something I want to do.

I don't want to change some parts of how I handle things. Primarily I want to make sure that I do respond to tweets. I know most other high volume users look at this differently but for me it is important. I don't want people to feel ignored. I really do care.

I'm going to be running an experiment for the next 7-10 days. I am going to schedule blocks of time to handle responses and use CoTweet to schedule sending them out on a staggered basis. I am hoping the benefit will be that I am able to interact overall with people more fluidly, that I will be able to engage in live exchanges and be more proactive in communications. I hope that this will work better for followers as well since they will no longer get hit with 50-100 tweets in a short period of time. The offside of this is that I will not always actually "be there" when people see me tweeting. I am hoping this doesn't cause too much confusion for people.

I believe transparency and being authentic are important in social media. By openly sharing what I am doing I hope that this adds to - rather than detracts - from the way I am seen in the community. The impact of this on my followers should be a positive one since I don't often have chances to converse in real time on Twitter to begin with.

I may post an update at some point on how this experiment works. Please DO post comments sharing what you think about this approach.

Are you following me on Twitter?

How I'm Staying Organized in 2009

I'm definitely not a Microsoft product fan but this year I've actually come to use and love one of their products - OneNote.

Basically OneNote works like a notebook. You can create Section, Section Groups, Pages and Subpages. You can add links, copy webpages, audio, video - basically whatever you want in there.

My computer desktop used to be a mess. I used to add shortcuts to webpages I wanted to go back to, would download files to the desktop, have folders for things I was working on there. Basically all the "stuff" I didn't want to forget about went on my desktop. Needless to say that over time it made it impossible to find what I needed (defeating the purpose of putting it there) and it also would slow down my computer.

At the start of 2009, I decided to start using OneNote instead of my desktop. I'm actually putting files in proper folders now and am no longer saving shortcuts. Everything is going in OneNote instead. I'm not only able to find things quickly, but I'm also saving time AND getting things done.

I'll share the way I am using it. Maybe it can give you some ideas:

* I created a new OneNote called Projects. This is my default one so that whenever I open up OneNote, it will open where ever I was last in Projects.

* I have a section called "To Do's". Within this section, I have a page called "Timed". This is where I put all upcoming appointments. I have a page called "Miscellaneous" where I just dump stuff in that I need to get done at some point and don't have a time/date for it yet. I then have a bunch of sub-pages - one for each day of the week. On these sub-pages, I create mini areas where I group everything I need to do by category. For example, I have one category for "Financial", another for "Domains" etc. This allows me to move a full category forward to another day or just individual tasks if need be. When I am waiting on something from someone else, I will highlight the item. I also drop links in for sites I want to go back and check into a relevant area.

* I have a section called "Staff". On the main page, I keep a summary status page so I know anything major going on with individual people. One look at that a day tends to be sufficient. I then have a page on each person where I keep a general log of communications. This is linked to from the summary page.

* I have Section Groups for Domains, B2B websites, Websites and Ideas. Within each Section Group, I have a section for each site/area. The main page for each site/area will give a snapshot look - often providing a timeline. On a weekly basis, I do a quick revision of each section and make sure the relevant tasks are linked to from my daily planners. Typically when I get one thing done from my daily planner, I'll then add the next item. But the weekly recap helps me make sure that things that get dumped in there for future reference don't get "lost". The Ideas section is a great way for me to organize ideas I have that aren't close to being actually worked on. I typically will dump in relevant research links, links on my computer to documents I've downloaded, contacts etc in the appropriate section.

Internally, we're still using Central Desktop accounts. I'll share more about how we are using this at another time. Although Central Desktop is a great tool & I wouldn't want to be without it for collaboration purposes, for the variety of things I need to get done/stay on top of, it was just taking too much time for it to be efficient.

Time management

I came across a neat tool called AllNetic for tracking time. It can handle two levels of tracking - by projects and by tasks. I've only started to mess around with it, so it's too early to pass judgment one way or another. The author of the software needs some grammatical help though!

I also found a neat egg timer that can act as either a stopwatch or timer.

Why was I looking for timers? Well, to put it mildly, after taking a 'vacation' from serious business, I need to focus on spending time on a regular basis on some core areas instead of wasting so much time with distractions or non-priority work. If I were to list all of the areas, you'd probably wonder where I AM spending time, so I won't waste space here. Suffice to say, my time management skills have been sucking lately.