Eliminating Daytime Distractions

I've fallen into a nasty habit and today I'm taking measures to stop it. You see, I spend a fair amount of time in the gym every week day. While my employer is supportive of this, my responsibilities are slowing increasing and with that comes increasing demands on my time. That means, if I don't want to impact my gym time I need to make sure I stay as efficient as possible when I'm not in the gym.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, there is a great video from Merlin Mann about Time and Attention. In it, he highlights the "time vampires" that just suck the productive hours out of your day. We all have them. For some people it's that stupid Minesweeper or Solitaire game that ships with Windows. I see others looking at Craigslist, eBay or my employers internal classified ads. Still others are using employer work time for writing blog entries. For me, its a combination of Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and Gmail. Along with all the automatic notification crap that goes with them.

Thats right, I'm turning them off during the work day with one minor exception. Sorry. These things don't get me to where I want to be and only marginally produce anything thats truly worth while. Tough love here, but my life is more important to me than you think yours is to me. In other words, no I most likely haven't seen your latest tweet or Facebook status. Deal with it.

What's the one minor exception? Anyone who knows me will tell you my short term memory sucks. So the exception will be logging into Facebook to record my running/walking/biking into an embedded app called Voomaxer. Thats it. And no, I won't be commenting on other people's status when I do this.

I'm also going to become brutally efficient in Goggle Reader. I have 4 levels of RSS feeds, all sorted on relevant importance to me. Every night the unread count is going to zero in one of two ways. If I read everything by the time I get off the bus ride home or I hit "MARK ALL READ" when I get off the bus. So no, I may not have read your latest blog entry. Again, deal with it.

I'm already a fan of In-box zero so that practice will continue... both for gmail and work mail.

Now, my job does involve a fair bit of mass transit and walking from building to building. During those times and if not accompanied at lunch I plan to use my lovely iPhone for catching up on all this loveliness that people will inevitably tell me I'm missing out on.

One could ask about Instant Messaging. But one thing I've learned is that instant messaging can be a huge productivity booster when used properly. So I plan to leave it turned on for the time being. It can be an incredible time sink, so if I detect I'm in a rat hole of a conversation that really doesn't matter one wit to the outcome of my life... Don't be offended if I politely tell you I need to focus on something else. It'll prolly go something like this.. "Fascinating discussion but I need to work on something right now. Laters."

Speaking of which .... this has been a fascinating blog post but I need to go work on something else now. Laters......