Your brain hates Twitter.
Jakob Nielsen raises a very good point in this BusinessWeek piece about businesspeople’s use of Twitter:
If you care about productivity, don’t check your Twitter feed while you’re trying to get work done. Disruptions are deadly for productivity because it takes several minutes to reorient the brain every time you go off track looking at something else.
It’s a point I’ve hammered on before, one that grows out of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into “Flow”: we don’t — we cannot — sink down into a piece of work until we’ve spent at least 15 or 20 uninterrupted minutes on it. This is when we get “in the zone,” lose all track of time, and lose any self-consciousness about the work we’re doing. We just work.
Much as I love Twitter, using it heavily makes you prone to exactly the types of interruptions that are likeliest to diminish your ability to do your best, deepest, most “Flow”-driven work.
But . . . right after the snippet quoted above, Nielsen said:
Stick to checking updates once per day — for example, during lunch. All the tweets will still be there.
Not so — at least not for many power users of Twitter. Many of the heavy users who extract lots of value from Twitter do so by dipping into it throughout the day, and it doesn’t work for them to check it once per day. By dipping in frequently, they can sample the current flow of tweets and engage in active-but-transient conversations that won’t be current later on.
So, good use of time or bad use of time? Or, to put it a different way: do you let the brain win, or do you let Twitter win?
I don’t have the answer, but I have two questions that I’d like YOU to answer:
- How would you decide whether frequent use of Twitter throughout the day was a worthwhile use of your brain, in business terms?
- How many areas of your everyday work besides Twitter violate the concept of “Flow” along the lines of what Nielsen describes? (Hint: e-mail.)
I look forward to your answers in the comments. Hit me with your best shot!
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Related posts:
- Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
- Book review: CrazyBusy, by Edward Hallowell.
- How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
- Fewer meetings should lead to more “Flow.”
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Photo by Laszlo Ilyes, used under a Creative Commons license.
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6 Comments so far
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I would relate this to how much we are focusing on the appearance of work vs. getting work done.
With so many disruptions that already exist in the work day — email, meetings, fire drills — I know many people who already feel that they actually get their work done after hours. During the day, we want to look like we are working by jumping on all the things that could be considered distractions.
Twitter fits perfectly into that model.
So I would agree with the larger point, if we really want to create more productive time at work, don’t blame Twitter. We need to re-evaluate what tasks we prioritize during our workday overall.
I’d say that Twitter acts as a sort of break for my mind. I go to it when I stop doing regular work or I need to crowdsource the answer to a question.
I can either get engrossed or I can do a quick hit. The beauty of Twitter is that you can have a conversation that last 3-5 days. But maybe only invest 10 minutes. Cool stuff.
Very true on the flow observation. When I’m heads-down in planning, analysis or writing I shut down Outlook, Twitter and everything else. That leaves just driveby interruptions and the phone.
I work in a very real-time environment, though. If I let an email go unanswered for over an hour the sender will come by to see why I’ve not answered it (or maybe to make sure I’m still alive). And there are sometimes good reasons for that; if my answer is all that stands in the way of a sale being closed, I’m happy to disrupt my flow.
Put it this way: I accomplished some activities today that wouldn’t have occurred–they would have been postponed another day–if I had a Twitter screen open.
I find that I have to reserve time for myself to really focus on important tasks. Otherwise I can distract myself for hours on urgent-but-not-important (http://tewalkerjr.com/blog/?p=921) tasks. On the other hand, I need a break from time to time to let my brain run free and have fun. That’s when I turn to Twitter, email, or just checking stock prices to see who is winning the Wall Street race today.
Oddly, I get my most productive work done when I travel to remote offices. There I don’t have a regular schedule, and the fact that I will be there for only a short period of time helps me focus on what I must achieve while there.
Paul, I agree with most everything you say here except “oddly.” LOTS of people find they’re more productive when put into settings like that — or (e.g.) on the plane away from distractions.
One note: we each have to parse how effective we are in our job functions via Twitter, e-mail, and other communication tools. I know people who are hugely productive at their jobs by being on the phone all day, but if I spend more than five minutes a day on the phone, it drives me crazy.