I didn’t (and usually don’t) do end of year posts, however something I read recently got me thinking a lot about 2011’s positives and negatives. One of the definite negatives of last year was that it really felt like a year filled with distractions.
The reading that got me thinking was Happy and quiet on Ned Batchelder’s blog. I started following Ned’s blog a very long time ago simply because he used to be involved in Lotus Domino, and I used to be a Lotus person (sssh). I don’t do Lotus Notes/Domino anymore, and neither does Ned, however I still read his blog as it’s full of interesting and insightful nuggets (plus loads of python, if that’s your thing).
The post above has a lot of interesting quotes in it, but the one that caught my attention was:
We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating.
This quote will ring true to so many of us – but you might be surprised to find that it was written in 1854. The constant stream of email (the writing and reading of which is ‘work’, however my main purpose in work isn’t ‘to write email’!), tweets, Facebook (which in itself is making us miserable), Google+, and so on, can make it really hard to focus on what’s actually important, and makes us feel incredibly busy and overloaded without actually being productive.
Ironically, I tweeted that quote, which went through to Facebook, where it got some likes and comments.
So, what to do about it? I don’t know if I have the answer, but I do have some ideas.
Last year I sandboxed my access to Facebook, which I think worked very well in reducing its ability to distract me. I’m going to take this a bit further by removing it from one or more of my iOS devices, and also by possibly removing the flow of my tweets through to Facebook. Why the last bit? Simply because I get quite a lot of responses to tweets on Facebook, plus the tweets make it look like I’m a lot more active on Facebook than I am – this is an illusion I’d like to remove, and hopefully it’ll help me engage with friends via actual communication channels. I really wish Facebook would add an auto responder feature to their Inbox – if I could have a message auto sent to anyone who mails me telling them to contact me via other means I’d be much happier about ignoring it a lot more.
However my main distraction is, and probably always will be, email. I have a terrible habit of wanting to keep my inbox as tidy as possible. Whenever I see people who somehow survive with “1622 unread messages!” flashing at them I cringe. I couldn’t do it – and that’s fine, however what’s not fine is letting incoming mail distract through processes and work flows, simply because my mind goes “Oooh well I can reply to that quickly right now and get it out of the way!”. So like many other people I’m going to start scheduling times for my email, and making a real point to shut down my mail client outside of those times. 2 real things to make that challenging will be the fact that I largely work from home, and that our main client is in a time zone that’s either 10 or 12 hours behind us.
I’ve also made the split between my personal and work email a bit more defined – that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when it’s your company you can let its identity define you if you’re not careful, and you don’t have that big brother feeling of someone snooping on you checking who you’re talking to “on company time”. When it comes to personal email I’ve got some pretty aggressive filtering going on which puts all the lists and newsletters I subscribe to in a special folder so they never hit my inbox, which means I can go through them at my leisure when I have spare time, without offending my inbox zero OCD.
Finally on email one of the major changes I did a few months back was disabling the new email notification on my iPhone. That little “ding” coming and going was such a distraction, even if I didn’t realise it. Turning off the notification gave me an instant boost to my productivity and to my sanity – I cannot recommend doing that highly enough.
There’s a few other small things, some that I started in 2011, but that I aim to pay more attention to in 2012:
- Having a clear split of my work and personal todo lists
- Improve the systems I use here to give me cross device access – mainly because right now my todo lists are editable on my PCs and Macs, and are readable but not editable on my iOS devices. This leads me to use the iOS notes app, and that split of having one extra thing to check is quite a large distraction in itself.
- Having a ‘someday maybe’ list, to give me a place to store things that I want to do someday, but that are utterly low priority (adding them to a proper todo list just makes you feel guilty when you look at it, or daunts you as it looks so incredibly long)
- Organising and pruning my RSS feeds – in my reader I have a ‘Daily Reads’, a ‘Weekly Reads’, and then everything else is filed according to topic/interest. Work can be reading too, as well as fun, but knowing that I only need to keep up with my daily and weekly reading can make the unread count of following a large number of feeds a lot easier to manage.
So there are my thoughts on a more productive and less distracted 2012. I know there’s a lot of reading out there on this sort of thing, and to be honest I’ve not read any of it! So if you have, or if you haven’t, and you have any suggestions or comments then I’d love to hear them.
Tags: GTD