Use Twitter to Become More -- Not Less -- Productive and Efficient

You don't often hear the words Twitter and efficient in the same sentence. It's almost as if Twitter was engineered by an evil genius to waste our time and make us less productive. Here are a few tips, though, to help you capitalize on Twitter to actually become more productive.

You can thank the Harvard Business Review for this collection of Twitter tips for becoming more efficient. Here are the highlights:

Use Twitter instead of e-mail. Twitter might be a time sink for some, but e-mail -- open-ended, free-form e-mail -- is worse. Much of the time, you can probably send Twitter DMs, which for5ces you to scope your replies to 140 characters.

Search for yourself, not your username. Twitter has a strong bias towards telling you about people who mention your username, but it isn't so smart about telling you when someone mentions your real name or the name of your company. But those mentions are important as well -- arguably, more important. Use a tool like Topsy to find and engage with people who mention you this way.

Queue your tweets. Do you need to post frequently? Don't randomize your day with ad hoc tweets that disrupt your primary job functions. Instead, write a day or two's worth of posts in one sitting, and queue them up with a tool like HootSuite. Let them go out on a schedule while you get your real work done.