Distractions
by Sapphire (June 25, 2006)
I made the greatest To Do list the other day. It doesn’t matter. I sit down to do the things on it, and as I do them, I have to back up and do other things so that I can do them, and before I know it, I’m researching or doing something that has nothing whatsoever to do with my list. Even when this stuff is productive… the chaos is getting on my nerves.
Why can’t I just sit down and do one thing? I’m not this unfocused offline. I think it’s a symptom of internet usage: you go to do something, but the site is down. You look for something you need to complete a task, but stumble onto something that gives you an idea, or reminds you of something else you wanted to do sometime. I blame search engines. If you were looking it up in a library, or calling someone to get the answer, you wouldn’t have all this extraneous, unrelated info sitting right there alongside the stuff you do need. You wouldn’t be opening up 12 other books just to see if they’re what you were actually looking for… and then somehow finding yourself thirty shelves away in botanical gardening.
Whatever the deal is, I’ve decided to tackle this problem and see what I can do about it. I’ve got a few approaches I’m going to try. Like writing down the distracting stuff so I can come back to it later. Ignoring it totally. The first thing I’m going to try is actually just linking to distracting stuff in one of my social bookmarking accounts - it’ll be totally dedicated to nothing but those distracting links, so that when I have time to review them, I’ll just go to that account.
Posted in Staying on Track
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August 24th, 2006 at 6:01 am
I can totally relate to the whole being distracted thing. I’ve been talking about that on my blog as well. It’s just so hard to get things going - when there’s so much out there that’s awesome… which leads to thinking about other ideas/sites… and then by the time you get back to the task on hand - hours have gone by.
I’m going to try to cut back on the RSS reading and constant stat checking for my various networks. Once a day. MAX. LOL. Maybe.
August 24th, 2006 at 6:02 am
That’s why I accidentally stopped reading other blogs for a while, LOL. I needed to stop just reading/thinking and start doing - but I went a bit too far in the other direction.
Stat checking is another bad one. That takes longer than I think, and looking at sites that have linked to me always leads to other things to research and do.