Stephen Coyle

Incompletionist

I don't tweet often (I think about 5,000 times in the past 12 years), but I was very much a Twitter completionist. I curate the list of people I follow fairly tightly, and barring a few muted people, read every single tweet. Tweetbot was really handy for this, for keeping my position in the timeline and syncing it across my devices. After about a decade of this, I found myself checking Twitter reflexively: waiting for a file to download? Check Twitter; waiting for an app to compile? Check Twitter; waiting for someone in a coffee shop? Check Twitter.

Realising this was doing me no good at all I quit cold turkey on Sunday. I deleted Tweetbot from my devices, and aside from going on the website a few times to check something specific (like the delightful absence of a certain 'real' guy's account), I've not been on it since. While I like and am interested in most of what the people I follow have to say, for the most part I also don't really care about it, and was giving it undue presence in my mind.

I've replaced the habit with a combination of reading on the Kindle app, reading in NetNewsWire, or just being alone with my thoughts. I'm genuinely surprised how little I miss it, and whether I go back or not, the completionist days are over.