Thread of thoughts on how to take a day off of Twitter , since a bunch of us are apparently going to be starting to do that soon!
How to actually take a day off Twitter
13 tweets · January 2021 · 23 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
First, to get this out of the way: if you slip up and go on twitter when you intended not to, it's not the end of the world. Beating yourself up about it probably won't help. But it's okay if you do beat yourself up about it too.
My suggestion if you realize you've found yourself on twitter on a day off would be something like, just tweet something that says: "Oops, I just remembered that today's a #TwitterDayOff for me! See you guys tomorrow!" and then sign off! (or just sign off without tweeting)
Anyway, having gotten out of the way that its not a cause for shame if you accidentally sign onto twitter on a day off, what are some things that might make that easy/effortless/natural/downhill?
I think it helps to announce it, so it's not just a vague intention but something that actually exists in the world, where other ppl are expecting you to do it. So put #TwitterDayOff or #TwitterlessTuesday in your bio, maybe pin a tweet the first few times, etc. What feels good?
Then if you're like me and you tend to leave a bunch of twitter tabs open, you may want to stow them somewhere. There's no perfect option for this til I tempt someone into making Tinder For Tabs....
...but a few approaches to getting tabs out of the way: 1. literally close them. best, but can be hard to do since you may be like "wait I wanted to repl—" 2. snooze them with an extension like Tab Snooze. they'll come right back wednesday! 3. something like OneTab / SessionBuddy
more approaches to getting tabs out of the way: 4. drag them to a different window/workspace that you can easily ignore for the day - preserves state fairly well, and pairs nicely with 5. use a userstyle that overlays a thing covering any tabs that ARE open. mine looks like this:
here's a bit of code if you want something like that. you can customize the message and colors. install an extension like stylus then import this css: gist.github.com/malcolmocean/5…
and of course you could also use something like stayfocusd, which is an extension that blocks sites. it has a weekly schedule, which could make it really easy to just make twitter go away certain days of the week, with very little effort
of course, if you have twitter on your phone (which tbh I do *not* recommend) then you'll want to log out or at least disable notifications from the app, or maybe block the app using some phone tool for doing that
okay, will add more stuff if I think of it feel free to share suggestions here 🚀 oh! one last important thing. if you're the sort of person who will readily just displace your twitter urges onto reddit or fb or somewhere with *lower* ROI, then block those sites too!
oh and also decide what the boundary of the day is gonna be for you. for me it'll probably be when I wake up til when I go to sleep, but I could imagine some people wanting to do midnight→midnight for reasons, or whatever just don't have it be ambiguous!