I am sitting in the living room, laptop on lap with 10 tabs open in Chrome, American Masters program about Woody Guthrie on the television, husband streaming a local government meeting. One of the tabs is TweetDeck…it’s Tuesday and so the blog post is about something I find on Twitter. This article form Edudemic seemed perfect: How To Be Less Distracted by Technology.

It includes 25 suggestions for how to reduce distraction, many of which include technologies. Interestingly enough, TweetDeck is one suggestion as it helps make Twitter a more efficient time killer.

The two suggestions that I need to practice are setting a limit on email checking and not opening up more than 3 or 4 tabs. I always have email open in a tab and watch the count, immediately clicking on the tab when the number changes. As for the tabs, I’m not sure how I end up with all those tabs…quick searches, clicking on Twitter, email and Facebook links, doing Google searches. I’ll look up to find 15 tabs open, some of them repeats. The article links to this great graphic from the Googley Gooeys, featuring five signs that you’ve opened too many tabs. All five signs apply to me, especially the ones about forgetting what you were doing in the first place and closing the important tab.

The suggestion for email is to only check it twice a day…I’m honestly not sure I could do that. If I were going to try, I feel like I should announce it since my colleagues have gotten used to often getting immediate responses from me, using email almost like chat.

Meanwhile, I can recommend the Woody Guthrie episode of American Masters…