Productivity

A Few Tips for Managing Interruptions

I dislike interruptions as they tend to make my work day much longer than necessary.

My earplugs were fitting properly and I somehow magically entered 'the flow'; the house next door to my office is undergoing renovations so the noise is dangerously high. Then the phone rings, it's my wife so I must answer, and the flow I had entered is broken. She was wondering why I wasn't replying to the other messages she had sent me (I turned off email and IM). Interruptions such as these, take away far more than the modicum of time required to address them as it can take 15 minutes or more to return to that mind set you were in prior to being interrupted.

I shouldn't characterize my wife's phone call as an 'interruption', it can be dangerous for me to mention that she is interrupting, but it's her call that is the inspiration for this short article.

When you work in a number of different environments like I do -- home office, work, café, airport -- it can add further to the challenge of avoiding interuptions. Here a few things I do to help avoid this productivity killer.

1) I turn off or delay all notifications. Auditory and visual signals from IM, email, twitterrific, and your mobile are all designed to grab your attention in order to inform. So this tip is the most obvious -- turn them all off. Some of my colleagues simply display a status of 'busy' but that is seldom enough as people interrupt anyway. I believe that few issues are so important that they cannot wait until I take a short break which is usually every hour or so (I have worked in 45-50 minute cycles all my adult life).

2) I face away from people. I love watching people, so if I am working in a café, or any other public environment, I position myself deliberately so I can't see them. Simple idea though sometimes difficult in practice. If it's not possible to find a seat facing away from the movement of people I'll start reading a book, something to revert my attention inwards and away from the environment around me.

3) I avoid my office desk. Your desk phone, your colleague's desk phone, the loud colleague who seems to shout when talking, the walk-bys asking for help, and on and on, all these compete for your attention. So I tell a colleague that I am off to the library and leave. I used to work with an engineer who had a public policy of no interruptions in the morning. The mornings were his time to get things done, the afternoons were for communication. It worked well.

4) I wear earplugs. I live and work in the noisiest place on earth. Music through headphones can sometimes work depending on the task I am trying to accomplish but if the music is good I start to focus more on the music than the work. Earplugs work best for me.

It's amazing what you can accomplish in a couple of hours when you eliminate interruptions thereby creating the right conditions for getting in the flow.

Some further reading:
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Outliers: The Story of Success
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Happiness and the Art of Innovation
Eight Components of Enjoyment
Goof off at work, read a book, ignore e-mail

Tips for Overcoming Procrastination

Most of us do not welcome change easily but we will benefit greatly from becoming willing to develop new habits to overcome procrastination. Below are just a few ideas to help with this challenge.

Excerpted favourites from their short list:

1. Remember that it is motivation that gets you started and habits that keep you going. Resolve to get started. 2. Put your professional and personal goals in writing. Prioritize them. 3. Write out a plan for yourself and make a realistic schedule.

Tips for Overcoming Procrastination for the Chronically Disorganized Individual or Household (links to .pdf).

MailTags for Apple Mail

Another in a long list of productivity enhancements I have tried, MailTags actually worked by allowing me to connect Apple Mail to iCal, something that Apple should have done in the first place. I haven't tried this latest release as I am still using Tiger but I haven't found Apple mail to be fast enough for robust email management anyway. Gmail is far faster. Your mileage may vary.

Indev's MailTags 2.2 is a plug-in for Apple Mail that enables metadata tagging of email. This release adds compatibility with Leopard's Mail 3.0 (including tagging of notes and RSS items) and also introduces a modular architecture for future enhancements.

MailTags. Via MacIntouch.

The Autumn of the Multitaskers

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

Link.

The Shrinking Computer and the Web Worker

Interesting topic as to what exactly do we need smaller computing devices for (beyond the obvious cool factor). I see it as being able to receive and transmit data in a way that closely resembles what we can do now in the office. Others see as allowing you to have the ability to work in any place at any time.

... as a web worker - someone actually trying to get work done on the web - I’m torn by these devices. On the one hand, the promise of increasing portability of computing is great; it opens up the possibility of being able to do my job more places than ever before, without carting around a backpack full of equipment and searching for power outlets and network drops. But on the other, these devices just don’t cut the mustard for me ...

Link.

Laptop Productivity On-the-go

From Lifehacker:

You're an on-the-go worker, and the one thing you always carry with you? Your trusty laptop, of course. Sure, you've reached a point where you're pretty good at getting things done away from your desk, but you still haven't reached laptop zen—that point at which your laptop does gymnastics for you and is a seamless extension of your productivity. Today we're taking a look at some of the best laptop hacks for notebook enthusiasts, from getting internet access anywhere and keeping your files in sync to adding an anti-theft layer of security to your laptop.

Article Link.

Sleep and Productivity

As we rob the night of sleep hours to get more things done, we are depriving our body of much needed time for it to repair and rejuvenate itself. Sleep is what we need to stay alert and focused on the day's activities.
Exhaustion, fatigue and lack of physical energy are common sleep deprivation symptoms. Exhaustion and fatigue affect our emotional moods, causing pessimism, sadness, stress and anger. The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) has suggested that social problems such as road rage may be caused, in part, by a national epidemic of sleepiness.

Read the article.