Resolutions

I often think that New Year's is a holiday created for me. Why? Because I am always making resolutions; truly, always, and New Year's always provides a nice clean demarcation line to use, similar to birthdays and anniversaries and so on.  But because I am so used to making so many resolutions in my life, there's never one thing I can point to above anything else.  In 2010, it seemed much of my focus was on losing weight, which is the cliche resolution to make.  Yet, personally, that resolution was made a few weeks before 2010 started due to health concerns, as I wrote on the blog at the time.  And, it wasn't a single year resolution, but a lifetime one.  When you constantly make resolutions like I do, remember when you make them, resolutions confined to a single year are rare.

Anyway, I enjoy making resolutions - because I find it reminds me that I always have things to work on, to improve, things at which to better myself.  They don't always fit nicely into yearly things, but the cleanness that comes from a new year does provide an adequate opportunity to reflect on past resolutions and their current progress, and think about ones that need to be made.  Much of what I seek to improve upon is ongoing, and I occasionally write about here, but something that is a continually gnawing is striving for more efficiency.  The reality is that there is only so much time available to accomplish certain things, to read certain items, to write certain ideas, etc.  So, the question of efficiency is to prioritize what things have time spent on them and analyze how that time is spent.  This is a daily/weekly/monthly thing for me - in some ways, its kind of counter-productive, how much time do I needlessly waste thinking about how to use my time more efficiently.  That's a little more meta than I want to be at the moment, but it does crop up every now and then.

But before I digress or babble on even more, what is currently on my mind today is my use of Twitter.  In the past, I have written a lengthy post or two about social networking sites and my use and attitude towards them.  The reality is, I think, is that I hardly use Twitter for any actual social networking or keeping up with friends, Facebook does that for me on the web, and frankly, in person is and always will be the primary goal.  Twitter is primarily a news source for me.  More and more, however, while the instant access to the news and opinion is enticing, its also inherently less thoughtful and more shallow than what I get, say, through a magazine subscription or through a subscription in Google reader.  Those things take more time to read for sure, but they also create a better information source.  Efficiency versus completeness.

I think the truth of the matter is that, for whatever reason, I feel compelled to participate in any tool that I deem worthy enough to have an account to begin with; and yet, doing anything with Twitter would be redundancy overkill combined with Facebook, a blog, Goodreads.  There's nothing more to add to a Twitter feed that wouldn't be covered somewhere else, and considering where most of my friends and family make their online presence at, there's not a great benefit to sharing on Twitter.  I would miss the instant access to news and information, but would gain time to do more writing, as well as substantive reading in books, as well as through Google Reader.

Its ironic really.  All of this, this entire blog post, is a way of getting to a conclusion that may have been most efficiently stated in the 140 character limitation of Twitter - Dear Twitter, I think I'm leaving you.