How to Survive Twitter?

This is not about solutions this is ….a cry for help? And yes I did read the Twitter Survival Guide. Let me start with defining the problem. Every blogger has his routine for writing blogposts. I mostly use a RSS Reader (GoogleReader). This is a collection of subscriptions to other blogs of interest, PubMed searches and content from scientific journals. Next I also check e-mail subscriptions and certain websites. I mostly discuss articles published in medical journals but also link to other blogs and websites. On average writing for my blog takes 1 to 2 hours per day.

Twitter started coming up in all sorts of sources. At first I was in denial, couldn’t figure out what twitter could do for me. Next after exploring some I started using twitter to promote my blog. Even installed several wordpress plugins to automatically publish my posts to twitter. But these plugins were buggy, even posted the drafts I was preparing for my blog. This drove some of my twitter followers to despair (Laikas). This made me deactivate the plugins and now I have to post my blogposts by hand to twitter.

Next I started microblogging. Some entries in my RSS reader of interest I posted directly to twitter, some interesting articles on websites and other links soon followed. These were interesting articles and posts but not interesting enough for my blog or somewhat off topic.

My number of folllowers grew including bloggers I knew from blogging or other social networks. Interacting with these bloggers was my next achievement on twitter and very rewarding. I received very quick replies on answers and very good solutions as well. @mdbraber even helped me with recovering my blog after a failed upgrade.

I started using TweetDeck, read the survival guide for twitter and another book about twitter recently reviewed on this blog. Next I was text messaging to twitter, showing pictures and would certainly also like to let everybody know were I was. A lot of twitter suggestions from TwiTip quickly found their way to my daily trials.

But after a while I realized that a lot of time and energy was dedicated to twitter and time and attention shifted from my blog to twitter. Now I have a hard time focusing on one or the other. Have to turn off TweetDeck to get some blogging done. Really deep down I prefer blogging.

So were to go from here? Any suggestions, please let me know in the comments, every comment appreciated even when it hurts.