Track your time on Twitter

Yesterday's post offered a suggestion about how to handle the sheer volume of information that comes your way via Twitter. Today's post addresses how much time you spend on Twitter.

Have you ever sat down at the computer first thing in the morning, started handling e-mail and soon found yourself caught up in surfing the web? You're going along reading an e-mail and there's either a link in the e-mail or it spurs a thought that sends you out to Google or a particular site. If we're not focusing on what we're doing an hour or more can go by before we realize we should have spending time on other tasks.

Be careful of falling into the same time crunch with Twitter. Some posts are simply statements, comments on other Tweets or inspirational quotes. But many Tweets have a URL embedded in the message -- links that take you to helpful articles, funny or instructional videos, interesting or beautiful photographs. If you're interested in the Twitter-er, you stand a strong chance of being interested in the information provided in the link.

So it's important to be purposeful when you sit down to spend time on Twitter. Depending upon why you Twitter -- a subject that will be covered in tomorrow's post -- you need to plan how much time you'll be spending on it each day. Whether it's five minutes, 30 minutes or two hours, know what you have scheduled and stick to it as much as possible.

It's certainly OK to veer from your planned amount of Twitter time, the important thing is to make the choice to do so instead of getting distracted and inadvertently messing up the rest of your workday.