Ryan A Graves.com

I was at dinner last week with a group of up and coming, creative, start-up-ish people and one of them asked me, “do you work or do you just Twitter?” At first I went on the defensive and thought, well of course I work. I work 10+ hours a day and I do damn good job! Then I took a moment and thought about my Twittering…I realized that I do Twitter a lot. Twittering is short and 140 characters takes about 6 seconds to type. So, I may Twitter once an hour but I don’t think that makes me unproductive. I don’t take smoke breaks or excessive coffee breaks, I take 6-15 second Twitter breaks.

I looked back through my “tweets” that day and wondered what she was talking about. I know that I Twitter a decent amount but what exactly does that look like to my near 200 followers? Well, that weekend/week I met with the CTO of GE Healthcare, which was awesome, I went to the Chicago Air and Water Festival, I road a scooter around downtown Chicago, I went out to a happy hour and watched the Olympics, I spent time with my girlfriend, and I went a neighborhood festival. Without trying to brag at all, I realized that my life was pretty exciting…at least on Twitter.

The thing about Twitter is that if used correctly it can make a person “look” pretty damn exciting. I’m not a huge fan of tweets like, “going to bed” or “just ate some rice”. I don’t want to read that that type of tweet, it’s a waste of my time, so I don’t post that type of tweet. I try and tweet the more exciting things in my life. I’ll share if I’m going to watch a movie or go on a trip or head to a bar or even work on a certain project but I find those things exciting and productive and worth sharing. That is the type of thing I’d like to read about someone else, so that is what I share. My tweets hide some of the more boring things in my life and highlight the more exciting events.

So when reading the tweets of other I always keep in mind that Twitter highlights the exciting and hides the boring. Not many people tweet about doing payroll but a lot of people tweet about closing the big deal or their latest vacation. Take Twitter with a grain of salt, it definitely makes me more exciting!