Low-Information Diet and No-Mail Checking

For the past week I've been trying to avoid checking email a bazillion times per day (because it derails me from important tasks at hand) and trying to defer my news/blog/Internet surfing habits until the end of the day when it won't fragment my attention and slow me down at work.

I've determined a couple of things...

1. It's probably not feasible for me to check email only twice per day (in my current employment status), because often I send requests to others and expect follow-up fairly promptly. In other words, my cycle time is greatly increased by a strict twice-per-day regimen, so much so that I'd risk failing to complete some important work objectives if I adhered to that.

HOWEVER, I can say that I am going to adopt a policy of not looking at my inbox first thing in the morning - I want to get settled into the office and at least begin working on my couple of "top priorities" for the day before I even allow myself a peek at what's lurking over there. I've found that this helps me preserve the freshest part of my day (mentally speaking) for the most important tasks.

2. A Low-Information Diet is tough to maintain when you're shackled to a desk, and when you have downtime/wait-time built into your work function. It's really tempting to jump over to personal email or check the news or blogs while you're waiting for a batch process to run in the accounting system, for instance. What else am I gonna do, stare at the wall? Unfortunately, what starts as a "I'll just check this thing real quick..." sometimes morphs into a "what was I doing again?" thirty minutes later.

I think the benefit of this exercise has been to raise my awareness of the little in-between slivers of time that I should be filling with productive activities instead of time-passers (time-wasters). I'm not sure that there are enough tasks I could queue up to fill in those little gaps, but the potential of getting two or three little things wedged in there could spell at least a few percentage points of increase in overall productivity.

I'd like to have a computer interface that would allow me to kind of "hang" a process or group of windows together when I have wait time like that. In my mind I envision it being on a plate, and I'd set some things in motion, then push the plate away for a while. I'd pay attention to another plate for a while, and then when I'm ready to return to the first plate, everything is kind of where I left it.

The problem is that spatially, everything is in overlapping windows on a 2D computer screen... I want some way to have everything laid out like it's on a desk, so I can file it or bring it up visually in one coherent task, thus aiding my mind in switching gears back into what I was doing.

I feel a computer OS project coming on...