After a break, it can become starkly apparent how much online media we take in on an average working day. Checking Twitter, Facebook and other channels has become an almost constant distraction for many office dwellers, with many of us following hundreds or thousands of accounts whose owners are barely known to us. Is now a good time to cut back?
If all this online chatter is putting you off your work, the answer is almost certainly "yes"! But how can you do it without missing out on potentially useful information - whether that means getting a newsflash before the rest of the world does or not missing out on a spontaneous after-work trip to the pub with your chums?
Taking a break does not have to mean disconnecting completely, and we'd never approve of a total social media black-out around here! It just means reducing the signal-to-noise ratio to a tolerable level. Here are some tips on how to spring clean your personal internet space...
Who to cull
- Twit-who? We've all had the experience of trying in vain to identify the person behind an account we follow. Sometimes they've picked a funny name to hide behind, but in many cases we just fundamentally don't know this person. Give them a quick google and if you're still a bit confused, let them go.
- Repeat offenders established etiquette now dictates that posting a string of updates in quick succession counts as 'spamming', and nobody needs that in their life. Companies and organisations with poor social media strategies are still inexplicably guilty of this crime, but plenty of self-obsessed individuals are, too. Don't give either the time of day!
- Drop the drama We've all got someone whose tweets or Facebook updates annoy us or even make us really angry. Why let them screw up your day? Identify these people and cull them. Or, if you want to be nice about it, start a 'three strikes and your out' policy first.
- Set a limit By reducing your number of followed people or accounts to a number you're comfortable with, you'll find it easier to give borderline cases the chop.
If you really can't unfollow or de-friend an account (but you'd really love to) there are some clever bits of software that should stop them from bothering you. Why not try:
Muuter: a service that "mutes" Twitter accounts by keyword. Simply tell it which subjects you don't want to hear about, and you shouldn't be bothered by discussion of those topics on your timeline ever again. It's ideal if your dislike of a contact is based purely around their obsession with- say - football.
The beauty of this tool is that you can apply it to one account only, so
in this hypothetical case you'd still get updates from your
footie-loving boyfriend.
The one major drawback of this tool is that it works by temporarily un-friending your targeted contact, which could still lead to the dreaded "de-friending drama"...
Tweetfilter is another filtering service for Twitter. This one is a browser extension, available on Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and IE. It has a more sophisticated search facility than Twitter.com, and makes use of it to let you filter tweets of a certain kind, whether you want to opt in or opt out of particular topics. By default, it also removes retweets from your timeline, so you will only ever see tweets from accounts you've opted to see.
We think that Tweetfilter is a good way to de-clutter your Twitter experience, but you may want to tweak it to suit your needs: many people find re-tweets highly informative, for example, as long as they are from a trusted group of users. Happily, it is very easy to customise.
Alternatively, using a Twitter client like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck gives you a degree of control over what you read, as you can set up columns to better organise tweets.
If your main problem is the distraction that Twitter causes, you can also use a program called Twitlert that works like Google Alerts to email you a digest of the tweets you'd normally follow, without you ever having to log in.
Filtering on Facebook
This is relatively easy if you only want to reduce noise by removing someone's updates in your news feed: simply click on the arrow icon that appears on the right hand side of their updates and tick 'Unsubscribe from [username]". This will prevent you from seeing their future updates, but you can still see their full profile and they can see yours.
If you want to avoid seeing another Facebook user's activity altogether, you'll have more of a problem. Without un-friending, you will still see any interaction between that user and other users, and they can still follow what you've been up to online. You can lock down your own profile to filter out named accounts, but this will soon be obvious to the target user and in real-world terms you might as well have fallen out.
