I looked at my Twitter dashboard the other day, something I don’t do often, and I’ve tweeted over 77,700 times since I created my account in November 2009.
I think that puts me firmly in the camp of addict Twitter power user.
My curiosity got the better of me and I started trying to figure out exactly how much time that very large number represents.
30 seconds per tweet seemed like a very conservative estimate to me, so in an effort to not make myself feel too guilty, I went with that — 30 seconds per tweet.
- 38850 minutes
- 647.5 hours
- 26.98 days
- 80.93 work days
And then to really drive the point home I started converting these measurements of time into daily activities.
- 648 trips to the gym
- 324 rounds of golf
- 12950 rounds of Mario Kart with Brady
- 452 date nights with Jackie
- 16900 replays of Morning Mood with Patrick
- 370 viewings of Ratatouille with Collin
None of this even counts the time I’ve spent consuming twitter, which is probably much higher.
It’s absurd to think I would have replaced every single moment that I wasn’t tweeting or scanning Instagram or replying to an angry Facebook comment with these other activities, but I like to believe some of my energy would have been put into these other endeavors.
I’m going to put myself to the test for a while.
Social media is a great way for me to unwind and connect with people I care about, so beyond the things I’ve already mentioned, I’m also going to be putting more effort into writing on this blog, reading interesting books, sending texts, writing letters, calling friends (after I’ve received permission to call via text, of course), and anything else that gets me away from the infinity pools of social media for a while.
This isn’t a rage quit by any means. I’ve really evolved the way I use social media over the years to be more inline with what’s important to me. My overall usage is way lower than it was when I first started discovering all of these social networks. I’ve come to enjoy social media for the most part.
But I want to put some of this 77K tweet energy into other things for a while. I’m not entirely sure how long I’ll be away, and my blog will automatically send out new tweets when I publish something new, but the social media apps are all getting deleted from my phone, and I’ve already logged out of all of the websites on my computer.
If you want to keep tabs on what I’m up to (and why wouldn’t you?), you can subscribe to this blog via RSS, or by email through one of the forms on this site.
Please leave comments too! I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on comments on this blog and will reply a few times a week as they come in.