I’ve started Twittering

I came across Twitter on this post on Kathy’s blog few days back and I’m already addicted. It might seem silly at first but it is an awesome utility to keep you in the zone. Well, let me first clarify, what”being in the zone” means. One of my previous post talks about how interruptions at work reduce your productivity( both personal and professional), how multi-tasking is costly to your brains processor in terms of context-switches . It’s very important that knowledge-workers understand and exploit this concept.

“Being in the zone” simply means that you are completely focused on the task at hand without any distractions. It dramatically improves your productivity and you can get more things done in less time. This will not only enable you to finish your work in the stipulated time period but also raise the quality of your work. When your brain is focussed on one thing at a time, it utilizes all its faculty to get the task done effectively. For e.g. if you’re reading an important design spec document to understand the requirements. You are totally into the document trying to comprehend every intricate detail…and…. suddenly your IM pings, or your email client buzzes to indicate new mail and if you attend to any of these activities , your brain does a context switch. And it takes a lot of effort and time to get the original context( of design spec) back. This leads to loss in productivity. If you think that such context switces are manageable, then you are fooling yourself. This kind of multi-tasking will effectively reduce your ability to focus on any particular activity thereby decreasing the quality of the output. Some of the external disturbancs like telephones, colleagues dropping in to have a chat cannot be avoided, but even if you manage to avoid the internal distractions( mentioned above), you can ameliorate your productivity by 60%-70 %.

Next question: what is Twitter ? In Kathy’s words “For those of you who don’t know about Twitter, it has one purpose in life–to be (in its own words)–A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? And people answer it. And answer it. And answer it. Over and over and over again, every moment of every hour, people type in a word, fragment, or sentence about what they’re doing right then. (Let’s overlook the fact that there can be only one true answer to the question: “I’m typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now… which is typing to tell twitter what I’m doing right now.” Or something else that makes my head hurt.)”

Now, where does Twitter fit in ? Well, I’d say Twitter is kinda, on-the-fly To-Do list which we create as we move from one task to another.The only difference is , this To-Do list can be seen by the world or only by your friends. Consider this scenario: you write in Twitter: ” Working on level 1 module of ‘Riddler’ game design spec”. You subconsciously commit yourself to complete that task without checking your mails/IM’s/RSS feeds. This is because, by actually writing down your task, you become aware that your friends( or the whole world) know what you are doing, which pressurizes to you finish it off ASAP. You can have tons of argument against this, but kindly don’t argue if you’ve never used To-Do list in your life. Twittering is not a panacea and will not make you effective at work overnight. It will definitely impose self-discipline on your actions. It doesn’t matter what you’ve written on Twitter, it could be anything,

” Doing my laundry “

” Helping Roomies with Dinner “

” Solving the Zimmerman Quantum-Acoustic Problem” and so on and so forth.

It also doesn’t matter if anybody actually reads your post on Twitter. All that matters is you write it and you do it…period.

In fact, this post was a result of twittering on Twitter . I had written: “I am posting a blog on wordpress now.” Hmm..it works .