Twitter has some remarkably good tools or tweeters who can help to provide the shift for you. Its easy to see think that Twitter is all about the spammers, marketers and advertisers, and even if you have a relatively clean follow list its easy to get bogged down in conversation, argument and other types of unproductive distraction. At first glance it might be hard to see how Twitter can provide Zen moments but hopefully the list below will help persuade you that it is possible.
Its worth noting that creating the unhinged moment is not just about creating some random distraction, because as we know Twitter is excellent at creating random moments. What we are looking for is a brief distraction that shifts our focus without getting caught up in an entirely new conversation. The following twitterers have helped me in the past to have a brief pause or wake up at some crucial moment, where the distraction of the tweet was ultimately productive in my workflow.
This cute little creature is pretty active throughout the day and its tweets consist of sleep, stare, eat, sleep, jump, run, sleep ... Its the perfect one liner you need when you are trying to debug IE6. Actually the common squirrel just jumped while I wrote that.
Big Ben helps me to realise how much time Im spending on a project and really helps me to snap out of it and leave my desk for a while. Big Ben tweets every hour on the hour and if I havent left my desk in between two tweets from Big Ben then I know Im in trouble.
Seems like a common squirrel wannabe but probably worth the distraction.
Less effective than the others and seems to be a take on the common squirrel type twitter stream but has potential, especially if you are in on US political humour.
Jim Carrey probably doesn't fit into this group in terms of the simplicity of the other tweeters, but some of the short stories he writes in 140 characters across a number of different tweets are hilarious and have given me succour while trying to make my way passed a seemingly insurmountable cross browser obstacle. My personal favourites are his battle with a yeti and the discovery of a gnome on his kitchen table.
Ill leave you with an extract from Jim's classic blow by blow climb of K2 and encounter with the Yeti - read from bottom up. If you know of any other worthy people to follow Id love to hear about them.
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