Twitter as a Productivity Tool

When I am out most of the day today I usually get to catch up on Tweets just while waiting in lines. I use TwitterBerry on my Blackberry. I don’t love it, but it’s okay. However, it really makes me miss TweetDeck. So as soon as I get home I read my “Must Read” group on Twitter to make sure I didn’t miss anything. It was during one of these check-ins that I came up with a great idea.

You see, I have a problem with to-do lists. It’s sort of a love/hate relationship really. I love them, but I have trouble making them actually work for me. It seems like whenever I need them they’re not there. I write them down and lose them. I put them on my Blackberry and then forget to check the Notes application regularly. The only thing that works is writing something on my hand and that really only provides minimal space and isn’t very professional looking.

I have long-term plan lists, future blog post idea lists and several scraps of paper that have survived longer than a week, but I’m pretty damn sure that a lot of killer ideas and semi-necessary tasks are falling through the cracks. Now let’s jump back to TweetDeck. Forgive me for the non-linear post, but I promise it’ll come together in a minute.

I only have a few groups set up on TweetDeck right now because I just haven’t taken the time to use the application to its fullest. Today I was thinking about sorting the groups out like my RSS feeds. You know, something like: blogging, social networking, business, Internet marketing, etc. But I have enough trouble keeping those organized in my feed reader because of all the overlaps.

So I wrote off that idea, but I still had the idea of finding a more productive use for TweetDeck groups bouncing around in my brain. And finally something clicked: I would use Twitter as my short-term to-do/idea list. I’m fairly sure I’m not the first person to think of something like this, but I thought I’d share how I set it up anyway.

• I created a new Twitter account to act as my to-do list
• Then I logged out of the new account, signed into my usual Twitter account and followed my new to-do list user.
• Third, I created a group called “To Do” in TweetDeck and added just my new To-Do account to the group. Now I can view everything I post to that account – all my to-do tasks – in that TweetDeck group.
• Whenever I have a new task now I just post to my to-do list account. On my desktop I can use another Twitter client (since TweetDeck doesn’t support multiple accounts) or just access Twitter with my browser. On my Blackberry, I use TwitterBerry for my main Twitter account so I installed Tiny Twitter and signed in with my to-do account. Now I can post and review to-do items at home or on the run.

It seems like every week I find a new and interesting way to use Twitter and the applications that have been developed for it. I’m positive that this to-do list system is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the versatility and usefulness of Twitter.