The Next Web

How Tweetdeck makes Twitter a GTD-friendly tool

Written on August 11, 2008 – 10:41 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Although some hardcore Twitter fans might oppose, I think it’s fair to say Twitter is bad for productivity. The last ten minutes, I received eight “new Tweets” alerts. That’s 48 every hour, meaning I have 384 distraction moments during an ordinary 8-hour work day. And I only follow 151 people. How will I be able to focus on my blogging with the distraction monster called Twitter roaring in the background?

So after reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) a couple of months ago, I decided to determine standard times for Twitter. After a while I found this was called batch-processing. Darren Rowse advises in an excellent post how he discovered that most of the work that he does can be ‘batched’ in one way or another. So a 30-minute writing batch, a 20-minute email handling batch, and.., a 15-minute Twitter batch. I have been doing this for quite a while, and in terms of productivity, it works really well.

There’s a disadvantage to batching Twitter though

Although I’ve been writing more, thanks to controlling the Twitter-beast, I feel like I’m missing out on a great number of interesting conversations. If I open Twitter at 1pm, it’s too late to participate in an interesting “why blogging sucks”-discussion of 8am. The moment is over. Moreover, I don’t wanna be the guy who only sends stuff.

Tweetdeck to the rescue

But now there’s Tweetdeck. The service launched in beta early July, but suffered from Twitter offline time. When Frederic Lardinois from ReadWriteWeb reviewed the service, he wrote that with Twitter’s track function still being offline, Tweetdeck wouldn’t be suitable for everyone.

But the grouping feature got me excited (I already begged for it in March). The thing is, thanks to the batching, I noticed that specific people added the most value to discussions, posting interesting links or well thought over replies. What if I would make some sort of A-list? A really exclusive list of people of which I’m sure they post things I want to read right-a-way. I already have an A-list in my RSS reader, so why not on Twitter? Thanks to the handy column feature (see example below), I can take a look at my A-listera and save the other Twitter updates for later.

Screenshot from the website of Tweetdeck. See how the columns allow you to group your Twitter contacts.

This is how Twitter became GTD-friendly for me

Ok, let’s use a bullet list to explain the way I Twitter now:

• I check my A-list of Twitterazi after I’ve finished a batch. Most batches take me 20 minutes, so I won’t miss any interesting discussions in which my A-listers are participating.
• I also check my replies column, as I want to respond asap
• My regular Twitter-batching habit stays the same. I still check the feeds of all my Twitter contacts three times the day.
• Whenever I feel like I missed an interesting discussion, I’ll add the person responsible for this to my A-list
• The result? I pick up interesting stories pretty quickly and find myself interacting more with my Twitter contacts

Although the mention of an A-list brings up associations with arrogance and endless lines at fancy clubs, it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s just a way for me to become a better blogger. I’ve shared it with you, so that you can use Twitter as a GTD-friendly tool as well.

Thanks Yaron for the tip!

I hope you like that post!

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david allen, getting things done, gtd, twitter

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Checkser.com: checklists database in the making

Written on February 27, 2008 – 7:09 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Checkser is a service that allows people to create public checklists, whatever the subject. Founder Marijn Deurloo came up with the idea during his brainstorm with his mentor, only a few weeks ago, and started to develop it right-a-way. The result is a very simple and clean-looking site.

You can look up checklists by browsing through the tags, user history pages or using the search engine. Some useful checklists I have found: a fishing trip list, Bottle soccer, Financial Management and a Web standards checklist.

KillerStartups reviewed the service as well, and they were pretty enthusiastic about it. Yet they did miss something: ‘Some more web 2.0 features would also be nice, such as user profiles’. I’ve emailed Deurloo to find out if he will add features like that. He replied: “Checkser is currently linked to the openID-initiative for linking to profiles, so authors can make themselves known by entering their openID-id. A link to their openID profile is then added to the “history”-page of a checklist. In the future, more social features like ratings will be added.”

I hope he will, since the anonymous approach might actually threaten the quality of the content. Especially since the checklists have a ‘read more’ link that the creator of the list can use to link to his own page. Deurloo deliberately added that function so that checklists can be used as teasers for companies. Yet it could be too tempting for gambling sites and other infamous low quality content sites to use it as an extra ad space.

So I’ve asked Deurloo how he will make sure that the quality of the checklist will remain good. Deurloo: “I’m hoping that the same mechanism that works well for Wikipedia will also work for checklists. Users help keeping the quality up, by being able to revert to previous versions of checklists and branching off those.” The self-control approach doesn’t really work yet, since the tag ‘test‘ contains 34 test checklists. More traffic and users might end this problem.

Unlike Wikipedia, Checkser does have a business model. It’s not much yet, Deurloo uses the Amazon affiliate program. “By suggesting relevant books to the checklists, I hope a little money can be made.” Makes sense, since he attracts a Getting Things Done crowd, and they’re generally eager to buy books.

But Deurloo has more good plans for the future: “As several businesses have already asked me, I will be creating a “pro”-version with company-private checklists for use on intranets for a small subscription fee. Kind of like the Basecamp and Backpack websites do.” So Deurloo can soon mark the ‘create pro version’ point on the ‘How to run a successful Internet service’.

checklists, checkser, getting things done, lifehacking, wikipedia

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