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On the brink of a week-long vacation, I made a conscious decision to lay off the never-ending communication flow.

While I chose mostly to keep up on e-mail, I decided to go cold-turkey on the incessant communications. That meant no blogging for me, no reading other blogs, and no Twitter posting.

Miraculously, I survived.

In fact, when I got home I barely skimmed my RSS feeds and decided to toss out the WSJs that had piled up. (That’s right, I read the physical version of The Wall Street Journal.) And once again, I survived.

The information overload that we tech people put on ourselves is really overwhelming. Of course, it’s voluntary. But you have to keep up with the competition, analysts, blogs, etc. in order to stay informed and relevant. Still, there is something to be said for the fact that physical papers force you to sit down and read instead of getting bombarded with two paragraph messages on your cell phone.

I still find Twitter moderately entertaining, but the constant chattering is hugely distracting and rarely relevant to what I need to get done in a day.

I did slip a few tweets in when I was waiting at the airport but felt OK about doing that.

For better or worse, my vacation may end up voiding my theory of Twitter as a marketing tool.