A couple of years ago I read Deep Work by Cal Newport. More recently I’ve been identifying with the difficulty to be creative, wondering where my time is going and feeling generally unproductive. I don’t believe there are any silver bullets in this space, but I do agree that Social Media, and the drip feed of news is generally unhealthy. I quit facebook years ago and do not miss it.

I don’t want to quit twitter, there are useful discussions here and it’s a great way to keep in touch with an extended network of people involved in my workspace. However, I would like to mindlessly stop browsing it to fill 30 seconds of “boredom”.

It’s possible to remove the news feed by altering the css. I’m using the stylebot chrome extension. I add the following CSS to twitter:

#timeline > div.stream-container.conversations-enabled {
    display: none;
}

This should help to:

1. Keep a twitter account
2. If I mindlessly wander to twitter, I’m less likely to spend 5 minutes aimlessly scrolling
3. Write intentional tweets on twitter’s website
4. Interact with twitter notifications via email
5. Only read a weekly email summary of popular tweets (hopefully lessens the feeling of fomo on twitter)
6. Have the confidence to delete twitter from my phone too

P.S. something like SelfControl is very effective for reducing general procrastination website use, especially reddit!