dria.org

A while back I blogged a grandiose scheme for reclaiming my fragmented attention stream. These plans included such things as separating work and personal mail completely, and checking each only during the appropriate time; minimizing meetings (both number and length); killing Twitter; minimizing IRC; organizing feeds; and so forth.

I have managed to do many of these things, discovered that others are too restrictive and unrealistic, and added a few other things to the list. Overall the experiment is going swimmingly — I feel much, much more focused, productive, relaxed, and happy with what I’m accomplishing.

Here’s a rundown of what didn’t work, what did, and the new things I’m trying.

Didn’t work

Work and personal email: Trying to separate work and personal mail and maintain some pretense of “regular business hours” when figuring out when to pay attention to which was a failure from the get go. I’ve been working from home for three years and I love my job — the lines between “work” and “life” are blurred beyond recognition. And I kinda like it that way.

Minimizing IRC: IRC is one of the primary discussion and communication channels in the Mozilla Project. If you really want a better sense of what’s going on around the project, you have to join more channels, not fewer. I’ve found an IRC client (Linkinus) that deals with large numbers of channels better than XChat, which is helping.

Did work

Minimizing meetings: I now have three standing meetings per week, accounting for roughly three hours of my time. I had three meetings in addition to that in the past week, but each was under 15 mins in length (with further followup via email). The rest of my time is my own, and I have two full days that are entirely meeting-free. Having huge blocks of uninterrupted time? Turns out it’s awesome.

Killing Twitter: I regressed on this one for a while and reinstalled Twitter for a few weeks, but have just killed it completely now. It really is nothing but noise.

Organizing feeds: This works like a charm. I do occasionally flip through my non-work feeds during the week, but for the most part I save them for evenings or weekends.

Unplugging: This is a bit of a misnomer now, since “unplugging” doesn’t actually mean “getting away from the machines”. It does, however, mean “getting completely away from work stuff” for at least a couple of hours per day. This is where I watch a few episodes of Buffy while playing EverQuest2, for example, or catch up with the week’s TV shows. It’s really no more complicated than giving myself permission to just ignore work for a few hours a day (and more on weekend), but it works. I recommend it highly.

New stuff I’m trying

Killing Facebook: I am no longer using Facebook at all. Not only did I shut off all notifications, I actually “disabled” my account. No more vampire invitations for me! Honestly, if people want to contact me they know how to find me without Facebook.

OmniFocus: The good folks at the OmniGroup have released the first public beta of OmniFocus — their personal productivity and organization app. It’s great. I’ll be pre-ordering it to take advantage of the price reduction.

Spaces: The new Spaces feature of OSX is fantastic. I only have two spaces set up right now — one for my regular mass of apps (IM, IRC, OmniFocus, feed reader, regular browsing, etc.) and one that’s completely empty except for whatever app I’m using to accomplish a task (usually TextMate or Firefox). Being able to just flip-flip-flip between workspaces and clear out all the distraction is just brilliant.

I use Remember the Milk (RTM) as my personal task organizer and TODO list. It’s fast, simple, flexible enough to be useful, but not so flexible that you end up tweaking the system more than you get things done with the system. Two thumbs up, would buy again, and will buy a Pro membership as soon as there’s a real reason for me to do so.

The folks over at Lifehacker like it a lot, too, and have written a great introduction to getting organized with RTM.

I love the Internet. It is a fundamental part of my daily life — my work, my hobbies, my interests, my news, my entertainment, and my communication streams all involve computers, the Internet, and/or the Web in some way. Recently there has been an explosion in the number of applications I use to get information and to communicate with people online: email (Google, Zimbra), IRC, IM (jabber, AIM, ichat), Twitter, web feeds (back up to over 350 now), a host of forums, an even larger host of websites (both social and non), and so forth.

Unfortunately, the result is that my attention is utterly fractured. If it’s not a conversation in one of my dozen IRC channels it’s an IM message; if not an IM message then it’s a Twitter update, or an email, or my feed reader has new items, or I’m flipping through my dozens of browser tabs, or my calendar is reminding me of one or another meetings or other appointments. I am becoming overwhelmed by this firehose of information, and it’s destroying my ability to focus, to read and think deeply, and, fundamentally, to get work done.

It needs to stop. At very least, it needs to be reduced to a trickle. Thus, I am going on an information diet. The changes I will be working towards are outlined below. “Working towards” means that while I doubt I will stick strictly to this regimen, it is the disciplined ideal towards which I strive.

1) During the work day I will only be checking personal email twice — once at the beginning of the day, and once at lunch (”lunch” can range from 11am to 2pm Eastern Time). After hours, I’ll check when I happen to think of it.

2) During the non-work day I will only be checking work mail once — sometime between dinner and bed. No guarantees what time that will be or whether I’ll be doing anything more than flagging items of interest to deal with the next work day.

3) Over the weekend I will be checking both personal and work mail only twice per day — once in the morning and once before bed.

4) Scheduled meetings are sacred. If I’m scheduled and expected to attend a meeting, I will. If it’s an optional meeting, I will make the decision whether or not to attend when my iCal reminder pops up. If there’s an optional meeting you think I should definitely attend, let me know. I don’t mind meetings, I just want to keep them to a useful minimum.

5) Twitter, while entertaining, has not yet proven to be useful. It will be getting shut off during work hours from here on out. Bummer because it’s invariably good for a laugh, but it’s just too distracting.

6) I will be reducing my IRC channels to the bare minimum during work days. Outside of work hours, all bets are off. If you need to contact me try instant message first, calling my work extension second, or calling my cell third. If I respond to none of these, please email me at my work address if it’s work-related or my personal address if it’s not-work-related.

7) I’ve organized my web feeds into two major groups: “Work” and “Everything Else”. I am reducing the update frequency from every 15 mins to every 2 hours. I will only be checking the “Everything Else” group outside of work hours. Oh lolcats, I will miss you so.

8) When I’m in a phone meeting I will be minimizing all windows except those directly involved with the meeting (agenda, notes, backchannel). Harsh, but necessary. I sat through two phone meetings today and realized that I didn’t hear a single word because I was too busy yammering away in unrelated IRC channels and scanning my web feeds. This is both rude and a complete waste of time, and I apologize for it.

9) I will be unplugging for at least one work hour per day. This means I will simply go offline. During that time I will either be reading, thinking, or working on proposals/documentation/etc. If it turns out that I’m getting solid work done, I reserve the right to extend my unplugged time indefinitely. Turns out a lot of my job is thinking, reading, and writing. If I appear to be offline and you need to contact me, call my extension or my cell.

10) Kinhin. Ok, not technically kinhin, but a very distant personal approximation thereof. Kinhin is a walking form of Zen meditation. Real Zen practitioners do kinhin between periods of zazen (sitting meditation), and it is a very rigorous, formal practice. For me it just means “walking for an hour every day and trying to get my mojo back”.