Ditching RSS (mostly) for Twitter

So I recently decided to “clean up” my online life, meaning trying to cut down on distractions and wasted time online, inspired by a slew of signals (including this xkcd blag). The first thing I did was cut out all the RSS feeds in Google Reader that posted more than a few times a day (e.g. techcrunch, engadget, boingboing). I still have a lot of blogs that I follow (~30) but combined they only account for a few posts per day, that I check once in the morning and once at night.

I replaced that by following a bunch of new twitter accounts for those same sites and related people. To avoid getting completely bogged down by twitter instead of rss, I set my twitter client to automatically scroll as new tweets arrived, and created a couple lists for “don’t miss” important accounts (close friends). I still scroll back sometimes, usually if I’ve been disconnected for a while, which doesn’t happen too often. But overall I’m just checking it passively, and any interesting links go into a separate browser window that I go through at a convenient break time instead of on the spot.

The big question was, would I still get the news I was interested in? Would I miss anything? Would I actually cut down on my “wasted” internet browsing? Initial results say yes, who knows?, and definitely. I mean, if I’m missing something, I’m not really going to know that I missed it, am I? (For those of you sitting in the back, if you can’t hear me please raise your hand.) But I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. And it also seems like I spend less time reviewing things that don’t interest me. The twitter character limit and not being able to immediately view posts like in GReader makes skimming over unimportant content quicker. Or more avoidable, or something. Overall, it feels like a definite productivity improvement.

Now trying to decide what the next productivity change should be. Thinking of “dark” hours (i.e. times when I’m not allowed on the computer, or maybe just the internet), which is difficult since my work is so closely tied to being on the computer. Thoughts?