This pretty much goes without saying, but distractions are anathema to productivity. (Sidenote: I recently found out that I’ve been pronouncing “anathema” wrong all along — it’s a-NATH-e-ma, not a-na-THEME-a. Whoops.)
Back to distractions. (Ahem.) When I’m not focusing on the task at hand, I turn into distraction-seeking mode — checking my email every couple minutes, scrolling through the latest tweets in my Twitter feed, pulling up Google Reader to see if there’s anything new, and then looking through my open tabs to see if there’s something interesting I haven’t read yet.
It hurts my head. No, really — when I spend more than a little bit of time in this mode, I feel my brain scrambling like a pair of eggs. Oh, wait, that’s drugs. Anyway, it’s not healthy. (Can we say headache?)
Much better to isolate distractions into their own corner. My new goal is to check email only a few times a day, and then only read through RSS feeds and tweets once a day or so. Or at the very least make sure there are clear boundaries for when I do all of that so that it doesn’t bleed over across the whole day, because when that happens, blech, yuck, and ick, nothing gets done.
Focus is soothing and feels oh so good, but when my mind is pulled hither and thither, it’s too much. I want peace like a river, and you only get that when you turn the distractions off. That’s this week’s project: to become a distraction exterminator.
P.S. My new dream job? Doing book design/typesetting for a major publisher on a line of the classics (like the Penguin Classics). Oh my goodness, that would awesome.
P.P.S. Classical music sooths my mind, too. Mmm. (I’m listening to Beethoven’s Fifth right now.)
Throw in your two cents