Gifted Slacker

Chris of the Art of Nonconformity gives his rules for distraction elimination:

1. Gmail three times a day (no more)
2. News-reading twice a day (no more)
3. Try to initiate at least one minor-to-moderate project a day (instead of continually responding to other things)
4. Complete at least one task towards each major project
5. Spend time writing first thing in the morning
6. Never feel bad about stopping work to exercise

Here’s why they’re important to me:

(1) Reading email too often means I never work through all of the items in my inbox, classifying them and then moving on. So I always have some stress when I look at my email and see all of the unfinished, and often unimportant, issues to address. (2) If I let myself leave Google Reader open all day, I’ll start a thousand threads of exploration that I never finish. Simply, instant gratification and overvaluing not missing anything often outweigh deep exploration of the interesting things that come past my eyes.

(3) Initiating a project and (4) making progress on some other project are just good ways to make sure things don’t stagnate.

(5) If I don’t write my post for the day in the morning, I’m not likely to write anything I’m even somewhat happy with by the time I go to bed. I seem to be more productive if I get one little satisfying task off my back, right off the bat. This is especially true before something becomes a habit; like blogging, in my case.

(6) I exercise 7 days each week, and I’ve never felt guilty about stopping work to do so. However, I have felt bad when it has limited my time spent with people I care about. This rule should be extended to say that, in addition to not feeling bad about stopping work to exercise, you shouldn’t feel bad about scheduling your life so that you can get in enough exercise, even if it means a little less time with loved ones.

My next post will be about one way that could really improve the amount of time I spend doing the right work and, hopefully, it’ll apply to others’ lives.