But I would pause and ask myself, did I really need to tweet about the crappy service in the office cafeteria? No. Did I need to tell everyone I was at Bluesfest? No.
As the days went on, it got easier to not be tempted to tweet.
But then, I started missing some of the things that I read on a regular basis: Ian Black's up-to-the-minute weather forecasts; breaking news; photos from my friends.
"Maybe, you just needed to get away for a while," my DW suggested. "Maybe, you need to see that you are not ruled by Twitter."
I went six days.
But when I reactivated my account, I went the whole day without sending a single tweet. I closed it down when I was working, determined not to distract myself. I still suffer from FOMO, after all.
I changed my nickname, from @RossBrownfoot to @BrownKnowser. I'm going to limit my tweets—my biggest loss was sending out notifications of new blog posts, though this is the first blog post since I announced that I quit Twitter.
So much for that.
Twitter is important to me, but I'm not going to let it monopolize my time.
Lots of people have left Twitter and come back. I remember when Canadian political journalist, Andrew Coyne, made national headlines when he walked away from Twitter. He went back.
Why can't I?
I have often said that if I could only do one thing on the internet, it would be Twitter. It's not that I tweet a lot, or even read the feed very often but when I want to know what's going on, that's the fastest way to find out. Today, for instance, I was outside when I heard the fire siren. Then I heard only one truck go through a major intersection. I figured that had to be the pumper and there must be a grass fire someplace. Sure enough, after checking Twitter, I discovered there was a series of brush fires along the railway tracks and that County road 43 was closed from Perth to just about Smiths Falls. I was able to keep track of the updates on Twitter, better than I could have anywhere else, because it's not all coming from one source. I know how to search the key words to find more and was able to pass on the news to my friends on Facebook. I did retweet on Twitter too, a bit, but not as consistently as passing it along on Facebook. Just habit, I'm afraid. Must get better at remembering to retweet!
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