I’m working to remove distractions

It’s a common scenario for anyone that works on/with computers, or anyone that just wants to focus when they find him or her self sitting in front of one: there are so many distractions. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, instant messaging, email, RSS feeds, and calendars are your typical culprits.

Personally, I can focus, but I want to do better. But before I start, I want to at least rule out one option for getting there: I won’t use any service that blocks a website or application for an allotted period of time. Example: You set it to not let you on Facebook from 9 to 5. Simple.

Not only do I like to think I have more self control than that, but I really don’t think that the sites or applications simply being available is any real problem – at least not for me. I think it’s all those damn, pesky pop-up notifications and other reminders found on your screen. Or at least on my screen.

So here’s what I’m going to do. For a week, maybe two, I’m going to cut back on that stuff by:

• Setting my browser home page to a blank screen instead of Google Reader
• Removing the Bookmarks Toolbar from my browser
• Employing the Think application to keep me focused on one application at a time
• Disabling the GMail Notifier for my personal email (I cannot leave an email marked as unread even for 5 minutes)
• Auto-hiding my Apple Dock so that bouncing applications and notifications don’t suck my attention away (and it has basically been rendered useless by Quicksilver anyways)
• And even enduring the pangs associated with disabling Growl

This little experiment of mine really isn’t scientific (as if you couldn’t tell) and I won’t actually be collecting any data about how much of my time was unfocused. But hey, if I come out of this feeling better about how I use my time then that’s all that matters.

Experiment commence.

Information overload meets lazy AND ZOMBIES

I think I know my RSS feed saturation point. That is to say, the number of new items on a single RSS feed in one day that cause me to go, “I am no longer interested in what you have to say.”

Based on the Trends data from my Google Reader account and my own qualitative assessment of me, I am ready to make the following inferences:

1. If a feed updates on or below three times a day (on average), I am likely to read the entire item.
2. Above 3 times a day and I will begin to scan the headlines of the feed for interesting items.
3. At or above 15 new items a day and I will begin to scroll with more vigor. Those headlines better really start to pop out. (Zombies? Must read.)
4. At or above 45 or so items a day and I scan more like a speed reader. I cannot speed read.
5. If a feed nears 60 items a day, which I have one that does (thank you BBC), then I am unlikely to read much of the headlines in any given day.

On a related note, I need some good keywords for filtering out inane cricket scores using my Google Reader Filter Greasemonkey script.