I hate the phrase real time.

For one, it’s an oxymoron. Time is, after all, an invention, a mental construct we impose on reality because it’s convenient. This is more than semantics. Our greatest work and joys occur in stretches of focused, timeless mindfulness. Also known as flow. The more weight we give the construct of time, the greater it’s gravitational pull on our minds (and in turn our work and happiness).

More than that, though, what bothers me about real time is the notion that what’s happening online is more real, and by implication more important, than what’s happening in your life in the moment. This is false, but this is exactly the belief we’re acting upon when we regularly check our email or feeds. Twitter may be more interesting than your life, but logging on won’t fix that problem.

The trouble doesn’t stop there.

The truth is, we do want to be connected. We’re social creatures and we each have family and friends, associates and heroes, even a few businesses that we want to keep up with. But how connected should we be? Following every move of every interesting party in our lives is a distracting, draining, even self-defeating endeavor.

First, in real time everything is the same. Your tweet about the tasty burrito you just ate is treated the same as your announcement about your new product line. Maybe you can compare updates by the number of likes, retweets or comments, but how much do you want to crowdsource your info filter? Is the time saved worth the unavoidable homogenization of your intellect? Who’s to say the crowd is even right? Most breakthroughs in art, science and business come from individuals (or small groups) operating outside the mainstream.

Second, is keeping up with anyone in real time even necessary? Aside from missing limited-time offers (which are rare and usually worth avoiding anyway), any comment or link or post that’s put up will still be there when you get around to it. Asynchronicity, we forget, is part of what makes the web so powerful. This mad rush for synchronicity misses the obvious point: We clearly live in “real time” already and interacting in that space is infinitely richer than having a conversation on Twitter, instant messaging or viewing a webinar.

Here’s an experiment to prove my point: Challenge yourself to let your feeds sit for a day or a week. However long it takes for you to really start squirming, worrying that you’re missing out. Then check. How many feeds do you actually read? There’s some good content to catch up on, for sure, but most has a half-life in hours, if not minutes. Divorced from the hollow value of immediacy, most content isn’t worth your time.

Third, keeping up with real time makes your life harder. The sound byte foundation of real time — and Twitter in particular — only compounds the flaws and dangers of interacting in real time. Limited to 140 characters, we’re forced to be concise and engaging, but this discipline stops there. To be heard, to build a valuable web presence, we have to tweet more. One single tweet, no matter how good, is easily lost in the fray. The result: We’re watering down the messages we worked so hard to condense, burying our own gems.

Plus, living in real time is a nonstop race to be first. First to hear the news, first to read this post, first to watch this video, etc. The problem with first, aside from being tiring, is that the margins are tiny. It takes a lot of time and energy to close that final gap, and I’d argue the rewards don’t justify it. What if you gave up trying to be in the know and devoted that time and energy to improving your skills or spending more time with friends and family?

A short suggestion.

What if we took Twitter’s “less is more” mantra to heart. 140 characters is a good start, but what if we also limited the number of tweets each user could post each day? Why not one per day. Imagine how the value of each tweet would skyrocket. Twitter already is, I’ll admit, an excellent link sharing tool, but if you can only tweet once a day, how many “kinda interesting but not essential” links would you post? How many inspirational or funny quotes would you send to your hundreds or thousands of followers? How many ironic observations would be worth your limited bandwidth?

Twitter started a revolution. Let’s keep it going.