Over the last few months, people have begun asking me: “How do you do so much? How do you keep up with it all?”

Now, I don’t think I do as much as some of you think I do. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anywhere near the things I should have lately, so I began thinking about those questions.

I do a lot of thinking. I like it. It’s one of my favourite things and I like to think that I’m good at it.

But where do thoughts come from?

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a blathering of random metaphysical esoterica. What I mean is: ‘Why do I have these thoughts?

On thoughts

The answer is that thoughts stem from various external stimuli. From the conversations I have with the smart and talented people I’m honoured to call my friends and colleagues; from the blogs I read (also written by smart and talented folks, as far as I can tell); from the emails I receive: personal, business and mailing lists. From all these places and more, my thoughts spring. They tumble together in little parcels of disjointed meaning, scattered threads of random thought that bounce against each other constantly and gradually weave into cogency or are discarded.

On distractions

I’ve written before that I don’t enjoy the quiet stillness inside my mind, but that’s untrue. I have plenty of other reasons to dislike being alone with my thoughts, which are neither quiet nor still.

I don’t own a portable music-player of any description, because I tell myself that would be a distraction, that my brain needs a rest from incessant stimulation. The result is, of course, that I check Twitter from my N95 approximately forty times on my forty-five minute trip to work.

It’s odd that music, which aids me in so many facets of my life, can distract me so thoroughly from the rush and scurry in my brain. Or perhaps that is precisely the point. Music abstracts me from the current flow, insulates me, and allows me to achieve particular tasks with a stronger focus than if it were absent. Without those tasks, it just distracts me.

On escapism

None of this is likely to come as a surprise to you. We all need to get away, to take a time out, a little pause to regain our breath and our focus. Therein lies the problem for me.

Why do I need to watch yet another episode of the West Wing today? Or check my email, my feeds, Twitter, Flickr, again? Why do I need to take a book on RESTful Web Services to bed at night? For that matter, why do I stay up beyond all sensible hours until I’m so exhausted that my right eye starts literally twitching? Even now I’m listening to Ten (only the best album ever) and pausing periodically in my progress with this article to lose myself in the songs.

Where is the focus in that?

In which our intrepid hero takes action

The problem here does not lie with things like checking my email or my feeds. It doesn’t come from the external stimuli. It comes from when they are applied.

What’s the first thing you do every morning? Me, I open 4 tabs in my browser: Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter replies, and Flickr recent activity. While I wait for those to load, I switch to Mail to confirm I haven’t received any work-related email overnight.

Next, I “process” all the information on those pages and that sets me up for a good long day of reacting.

Fuck reacting. Act!

Over lunch one day, one of the founders of Atlassian, Scott Farquhar, said that he had recently been trialling not opening his email until midday each day. I tried it. I think I lasted about three days.

Now I’m going to do it again. And the same goes for my feeds, Flickr et al.

But wait, there’s more!

I’m also unsubscribing from all those feeds that I’m only following because I feel I should ‘keep in the loop’, and from all the mailing lists whose communities I don’t actively participate in.

I already vigorously prune my feeds and my contacts on social networking sites I use regularly.

A challenge

I have a challenge for you. It’s also for myself. Let’s see if we can’t do it together.

I have cut all these distractions from my life. I will cut more. I will carve away every input that does not lead to action. I will push the reactive part of my day back until after lunchtime.

I’m going to start putting my thoughts to work. All those bundles of meaning have been assembled into functional parts that need structure. They need a coherent whole and I can only provide it by taking action.

I’d like to see you do it too. Maybe some of you were already on the ball with this one, but I think we probably all need a little push and a lot of pruning on occasion.

Get to it. Drop the distractions. Take actions instead.

I want people to ask you: “how do you do so much?”

I was recently incommunicado for roughly a month. I was traveling, and living life mostly offline but for occasional travel arrangements etc. This resulted in the kind of online buildup you hear about from such circumstances: a couple of dozen direct emails (gradually being responded to this week); several hundred mailing list emails (deleted); thousands of RSS items (all marked as read); 14,000 unread in Gmail’s spam folder and a relatively small selection of bacn, including 74 adds from Twitter users. 74 in 4 weeks? WTF, Twitter?

Break it down

I wanted to use this sample to give myself some idea of who these people are so, as I processed the requests, I started listing how many I blocked, how many were bots and how many I thought of as Real People™ (possibly not the same thing as actual real people). And being the anal-retentive pedant I am, this lead to creation of more categories for those who didn’t fit the above three. In turn leading to some people meeting multiple categories and this loosely-premised article looking even less scientific - if that’s possible.

Obviously, this is likely to reveal far more about how I use Twitter than any data about Twitter itself. I found it interesting. You’ve been warned.

The numbers

By major grouping

I counted:

• 41 Real People™,
• 8 of those odd link-freaks,
• 16 purely promotional vehicles,
• 2 fake personalities, and
• 17 bots.

I added 14 of these and blocked 26 - which included all 17 bots.

Let’s work our way through in reverse order before we get into the Real People.

Bots (17)

You’ve all been added by them. In permanent use by spammers and unethical promoters, I block them immediately upon identification. I direly wish Twitter had a “Mark as a Spamming Sod” option like Pownce does. It’s about time the application stopped treating every account as if it were a person. That’s blatantly no longer the case.

That’s not to say that Twitter bots aren’t useful. They’re fantastic, actually. But only when they’re opt-in. The ones that come to find you are the type of loathsome evil that I associate with marketers who call your house or cheerfully knock on your door on a Saturday morning while normal people are still hungover.

Fake personalities (2)

Some I like, some I don’t. Most fade away within the kind of period that makes me not bother adding them. Especially since they’re unsolicited.

Purely promotional vehicles (16)

In this sample, they varied from sites and companies to bands or American political propagandists. They’re kind of like bots, I only find them valuable if I’ve sought them out for a purpose.

Link-freaks (8)

There is an obvious visual pattern created on a Twitter profile when somebody adds a link at the end of every single tweet. It’s readily detectable within milliseconds. Somehow it is even more obvious when there is the occasional comment or reply thrown in.

These folks confuse me. They’re not bots. Most of them don’t seem to be using automated submission of links and yet they post more than 90% lame link action.

Nobody knows that much interesting stuff. Nobody has that much original information at their fingertips. These folks are just re-posting stuff they find on aggregation sites. If I cared about the generic links that get posted repeatedly in every link graveyard on the net I’d subscribe to feeds from Digg, SlashDot, Techmeme or any one of 15,000 others. I don’t need it on Twitter.

Quit grumping and talk about the Real People™

I broke down these folks even further based on what I thought were interesting differentiators:

• 6 total newbies with virtually no posts but following 40-odd people;
• 13 people following 3,000+ people and seemingly attempting conversation with all of them;
• 2 people who used to follow me re-adding me (now that I was completely quiet?);
• 4 colleagues;
• 4 people who seem to use Twitter prolifically but don’t have a bio or a link off-site;
• 7 people who had recently replied to Jeremiah Owyang; and
• 21 self-identified Social Media Enthusiasts/Evangelists.

What the fuck is a Social Media Enthusiast? I know what a social media enthusiast is. Some people would probably classify me as one. But as something that warrants title case? Is it a job title? Who pays people just to be enthusiastic about stuff?

One answer to the last question would be: no one. Every single one of the SM Enthusiasts appeared to be a self-employed consultant. I would love some of those folks to let us in on how well that’s working out for them.

Evangelists, on the other hand, is a familiar (if conflicted) term. The big consultancies all have Social Media consultants now. I can easily see them called ‘Evangelist’ to ride the wave of familiarity with that particular term in technology circles.

Some folks even provided the slash themselves. They are both ‘Enthusiasts’ and ‘Evangelists’. Either that or they find themselves torn in that reputedly tricky limbo in between?

So what?

It’s a valid point. I don’t know that any of this means anything (except that @jowyang is an exceptionally popular Twitterer amongst a certain subset of users). I do find the numbers interesting in an abstract kind of way. They’re indicative of a broad range of Twitter uses that hopefully illustrates out the pointlessness of all those Twitter Etiquette posts that spring up every time some blogger cracks it with those he is following on Twitter. Pruning according to need vs satisfacton is the answer to that issue, not complaining that nobody does it the way you want them too.

I’m curious to see if others break their requests down in similar fashion (even on a one-by-one basis) or if I’m a little too obsessive. What do you do?