Using Twitter at a canter

Twitter is a fascinating tool for many purposes. It is not only a microblogging site or a social networking platform, rather it's an indispensable tool for professional purposes now. We follow hundreds and thousands of people and organizations to get their feeds and what's latest with them. But sometimes, if not most of the times, it gets tiring and fatiguing to check out all those hundreds of tweets.

Though we can use Twitter's list method to categorize the tweets, we would still have to check out each of them. Unless there's a text to voice feature added to Twitter, there's no escaping that.
But we can sift through tweets much faster and get to the ones that are most relevant and useful for us if we read them vertically rather than horizontally. That is, instead of beginning to read tweets to find out the contents of them, we drive our searching gaze vertically and read the first word of each tweet, from up to downwards, to ascertain its contents. If the initial wording of a particular tweet catches our attention, we take the second word and so forth until we decide whether to read the entire piece or not. This way, we can quickly and efficiently ply through numerous tweets to reach to the ones we care for.

Happy tweeting!

Disengagement for Productivity: Why we'll increasingly need it

Today's world is a global village. Everyone who can and afford to, is increasingly connected via internet. This technological encroachment has revolutionized how we spend our time now and how we entertain ourselves. It has shown us ways to learn in a new and diverse ways. It facilitates connections among people and gives a new dimension to social interaction. But there's a latent and inbuilt risk involved in this constant connected mode.

Namely 'distraction'. Our social media today is not only to keep in touch with our friends and family, rather it is a feed of our own choice. We subscribe and return to it to benefit from the channels, pages and services they constantly throw at us. We stay hungry for what's going on in the lives of the people we care, and in the world around. Ironically, we are not satiated in the end. Those modicum of information, that mixture of feeds only leave us more hungry and impatient.

At the end, exposed to information of various kind and nature, which is also insufficient and inadequate to quench our thirst, we grow impatient and agitated and repeatedly visit different sites and feeds for what we often don't know ourselves. As a result, it leaves us bewildered and dissatisfied. This is why disengagement is the name of the game in today's world.

We have to know when to engage and when disengage. In order to retain and increase our productivity and get rid of restlessness and stress that results from 'browsing' through materials and information, we actively should decide to disengage and disconnect to return to our priorities and academic/ professional activities. If we fail to disengage and return to 'life' and whatever we love to do, we will ever deviate and derail our attention, goals and ambitions.

So, disengagement is vital for increased productivity and fulfillment in life and work.