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...

Polyphasic Sleep Schedule - Shifting Gears

During the week of Thanksgiving I took a few vacation days so that I could have nine straight days off of work. I observed, as I've noted before, that a Polyphasic Sleep Schedule is a kind of unstable equilibrium - you can stay on it, but it takes some attention and a little effort.

During my vacation I pretty much let both go completely. As a result, by the end of the week I was pretty much back to a Monophasic schedule, and didn't really feel much urge to nap during the day.

I was of course curious to see if there would be any challenge to switching back. The real question, once Monday rolled around and I was back to reality: to Polyphase, or not to Polyphase?

I chose to Polyphase, if for no other reason than to test whether the transition would be easy or hard.

Thankfully, I found it quite easy. In fact, my Noon and 5pm naps on Monday were two of the most superb 20-minute naps I think I've had in a long while... perhaps the best since the beginning of the experiment.

I do wonder whether it would have been a tougher transition had I been Monophasic for, say, a month before trying to switch back. I seem to recall that Steve Pavlina wanted to try switching back to a Polyphasic schedule, but I don't know if he ever tried.

4-Hour Workweek?

Over the past week or so I've been reading Tim Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Workweek". Though I'm not completely sold on everything Timmy has to say, I will admit that there are many thought-provoking tidbits in there...

So as I travel down the path of continuous improvement in my personal and career lives, I'm implementing the following activities as this week's experiment:

1. I've shut off my email auto send/receive function - the goal here is to check email only twice per day, thus eliminating the endless gear-changing that fragments my attention and keeps me unproductive.

2. I'm going on the low-information diet - all the blogs and B.S. that I normally fill in between major tasks during the day are put on hold until the evening, hopefully helping me get in the habit of working on my one or two "big goals" for the day until completion.

I will say that the no-email-checking thing is really hard. The upside is that I'm realizing how frequently I have been alt-tabbing over to gmail or work email just to see if there's anything there.

Additionally, at least once per day I confess I tab over to email with a specific purpose, "Gotta send these numbers to Bob..." - and when I see my inbox, there's about 5-10 emails sitting there. Of course I quickly scan them and end up seeing a couple of responses on things I've been waiting for, so I read those. Then the responses generate more questions or to-dos, so I handle that. And then... what the hell was I doing checking email again? Oh well. Must be getting senile. So I tab back over to Excel and "D'oh! Gotta send these numbers to Bob..."

If this scenario seems familiar to you, I suggest turning off your auto-receive for emails and take back one small piece of your sanity.