Monday Productivity Pointers

- [Instructor] My name is Jess Stratton, and welcome to Monday Productivity Pointers. This week, I'm going to talk about a new feature in Twitter in which you can mute particular keywords. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a keyword. You can mute a word, a phrase, a username, hashtag, even an emoji character. With this, you won't get any notifications whether it be by a text message, email, or from the Twitter homepage itself. You can even mute punctuation.

To mute a word, start by clicking Notifications at the top of the screen. And right there on the middle of the screen, click Settings. Right away, you'll see some options here. You can mute notifications from people that you don't follow, who aren't following you, and you can also mute people with a new account, or who haven't changed their profile photo, or confirmed their contact information yet. This may be an indication that they're a new or not heavy Twitter user, and so you might not want to see what they're saying.

What I'm interested in is this sentence down at the bottom that's also a clickable link to mute specific words from your notifications and timeline. This is going to be great for when you want to avoid a television show spoiler. Or, if there's a major event going on, and you're not there, and you don't have any interest in seeing those keywords. Let's try it out. I'll click the link. I'm not muting anything yet, so I'll click Add, and now I'm going to put in the muted word or phrase.

I can also put in a username, hashtag, anything I want. Let's suppose that I cannot catch up on Game of Thrones and I don't want spoilers. So I'm going to put in all those hashtags. (typing) G-O-T, I'll click Add. I can only do it one at a time. So I'll click Add again. I'll put in a few more popular ones that I know people use. And here's one thing I forgot to show you.

Underneath, there's some more options to that muted word. For example, I can mute it from the home timeline, or just from my notification bar. And down at the bottom is my favorite feature about muting. I can choose how long to mute this word for. It defaults to Forever, which is useful if there's something that I just don't want to see anymore. But if I know I'm going to get to catch up on Game of Thrones tomorrow, I'll only mute this hashtag for 24 hours.

I'll click Add. And now it's added. Here I can see my muted words stacking up, and I can also see how long they're being muted for. Let's do this one more time. I'll click Add. Something else this is useful for, if there's an event going on that I don't care about, or a conference that's going on, maybe for a week. I'm going to put in, I'll just put in one for an example. I would never want to mute this one, but just to show you how it works.

I'll put in hashtag, I'll mute it for seven days, and then click Add. Let's go back to the homepage by clicking Home at the top left-hand side of the screen. Now, I won't see any of these. You can even do this from your mobile device and it works in a similar manner. Click Notifications, there's going to be a gear icon instead of the word Settings. From there you can tap Muted Words and then just add them.

To find your muted words, to see what they are or unmute some, click your avatar icon on the top right-hand side of the screen and choose Settings and privacy. From here, on the left-hand side near the bottom of the screen, you'll find Muted words. This takes me back to that screen that we saw. At any time, I can unmute them by clicking the speaker with a line through it. It's going to remove them from the muted list.

So that's how easy it is to mute words, stop them from appearing on your timeline, whether it be permanently or just for a little while. Once again, my name is Jess Stratton, and this is Monday Productivity Pointers.