You know how everything these days seems like a race? It’s bad enough that we have to run around from event to event, conference to conference, practice to practice and be the shuttle bus for our children, but let’s not even THINK about those things for a few minutes.

The race I’m talking about is the information race.  How much content can you consume on a daily basis? How many “RT” can we accomplish? How many people can we really, truly follow and keep up with?  How fast can you find things and tweet/blog about them before someone else has? How much *real* *new* information is being put out there every day and how much of it is just being passed along?  We try to find new ways to be efficient so that we can keep up and do more, but I’m starting to wonder what we’re becoming.

This post, again, came from a discussion with my husband.  Years and years ago, before “technology” came on the scene.. we had masters. Van Gogh, Beethoven, Monet, Seurat, Bach, etc. You get the picture.  These people were so involved in their art, so passionate, so involved in what they were doing that they became masters of their own destiny.  They tuned out everything around them, focusing on their one gift, their one passion. They gave themselves insisted on time to be creative. They designated their lives to being creative, to focusing/thinking/living solely for their art.  Think about how differently we work today.  How many of us can truly say that we have time to sit and dream, to imagine, or to be completely and passionately aborsed in that ONE THING that makes our souls sing?   Our lives have become so cluttered with all of the ‘noise’ that it’s a challenge to find any time at all to just enjoy the quiet.

I am someone that desperately needs some ‘quiet’ in my life. Being creative is important to me. Feeling passionate about something keeps me going, and when I’m surrounded with the cacophany of daily life, it makes it difficult to feel as though I’m doing anything productive.  How many of us these days are jacks of all trades, but masters of none?

I want to be a master…. of something.

I was having a conversation with my husband a few days ago related to recent discussions about twitter, and followers, and how fast-paced and immediate everything seems these days. We were discussing things like twhirl and Tweetdeck and the use of those tools vs. just using the webpage to update twitter.

I know that some of you are fantastic fans of twhirl and TweetDeck and other twitter clients out there. It seems like every day there’s something new to make it ‘easier’ to keep up. I don’t use them. I’ve tried them, I have.. but I hate it. I can never seem to fall completely in love with any of them. Every morning I pull up twitter.com and just keep that as a tab open in my browser and occasionally refresh and scroll back and see what’s going on, and what I might want to chime in on. I check my “replies” button, I click on the ‘direct messages’ button and then I carry on with whatever else I’m working on. I do the same thing on my iPhone. I use the mobile twitter webpage – not twitterific (although I will occasionally use that JUST for photos/twitpic), and not any of the other iPhone apps for twitter. I don’t need it.

I’ve found that if I use twhirl, or TweetDeck or any of those twitter clients, I feel distracted all day. I feel like I can’t accomplish anything and I wasn’t sure why – but now I think I know.

As some of you know, I’m a bit of a control freak (some of you know this better than others), and what I’ve realized is that if twhirl and TweetDeck are there, all day long, saying “HEY… SOMEONE ELSE SAID SOMETHING, YOU BETTER LOOK OVER HERE RIGHT NOW AND MAKE SURE THERE’S NOTHING AMAZINGLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU’RE MISSING!!!!! I MEAN IT!!!!!” then I have to stop what I’m doing, glance at them, and then try to get back into whatever I was doing before that. It’s terrible for me. I cannot concentrate or work that way.

BUT… if I’m using the website, I still have it there and can look at it anytime… WHEN I FEEL LIKE IT. I can update, refresh, respond.. on *my* schedule – not when some client tells me to. I know I can minimize clients, and toggle preferences to change things, but for me.. they just don’t work. I don’t like them, it doesn’t make it easier. You know what makes it easier for me? Following people that matter and just subscribing to the RSS feeds of everyone that might provide valuable information, but doesn’t engage in conversation and likely wouldn’t know me from dirt if I was seated next to them at a conference. This way, once again, I’m getting the information I want, on my own schedule and on my own terms.

Everyone else can suck it.