When last you heard from me, I was in the midst of an information diet. I vowed to avoid all news sites for an entire week.
Did the diet work?
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Day 2 of the media fast gave me no clear insights, except for one—it seems that the more productive I get on one end, the more others are trying to take it away from me on the other.
To paraphrase Al Pacino, “The more I try to get productive, the more they try to suck me back in to un-productivity.”
Since I was getting my work done so quickly, people in my office started asking me if I could “help” them (do their work for them) or “discuss a few things” (talk about nothing).
These time vampires (to borrow a term from Dan Kennedy) literally sucked all my productive time away.
Well, today I will employ a tactic my 4-year-old uses—the NO tactic.
I have written about it before, and have used it to great success. But it seems that when you start getting more productive, the time vampires smell blood. They figure that since you’re not “busy” you have time for them.
So, I will be cultivating my “busy” image even more. And when people ask me for help, I will use some phrases like:
“I’d love to, but I really have to take care of something right now.”
“I only have a minute because I’m on my way to X. Let me see what I can do now.” –Only at the end of yesterday did I employ this tactic (because it was true). But by forcing people to deal with me right then and there and putting a short time limit on it, those “emergencies” completely disappeared.
Do not and I repeat DO NOT let them say they can talk to you about it later. With the time vampires, if you leave the door open for them to “ask you later” then by gosh they sure will come by and ask you something later.
We’ll see how combining NO tactics with my media fast improves my productivity.
On the LeBron Front
It’s amazing what you can learn from headline news! I heard briefly that there was some trade to help out LeBron.
Now, I wasn’t able to read commentary telling me what to think about this trade. And I don’t even know the details. So, I can’t be so sure if this qualifies as giving LeBron respect.
I mean the media could spin the trade in so many ways so as to show utmost disrespect to LeBron. I’m sure they can. But since I’m not reading it, I don’t know.
I just have to deal with the raw facts of the matter and make up my own mind about what it means. Here goes that critical thinking again.
But with all the stories about the trade I’m sure some joker of a sportscaster will talk about how LeBron has “no more excuses” or use some other term that shows disrespect to LeBron. So, I’ll hedge my best and say they are still disrespecting him.
The protest continues…
No news web sites. No unnecessary web surfing.
The results so far?
Here are a few things I’ve started to notice from my media fast:
#1 Productivity has nearly doubled, but I have a lot of work
I roughly doubled my productivity. I’ll give myself a few more days to see if this wasn’t just a fluke. But what used to take me all morning and half and half an afternoon now took me only 3 hours.
I’d say that’s pretty good. Was I mindlessly surfing that much?
But this sudden jump in productivity made me realize I do have a lot of work. I’ll need to address that issue pronto!
#2 Is my critical thinking kicking it up a notch?
I do love politics and political news. As one my regular commentators to this blog Corinne Edwards said she couldn’t live without MSNBC, I was starting to feel the same way.
You see, I like election coverage. From headline news I know who’s winning the primaries. But without reading all the commentary, it feels like I don’t have anyone to tell me what to think anymore.
I may have to start thinking for myself. Perish the thought.
Seriously though. I get this same feeling I used to get in college. I used to read primary sources so I could come up with my own conclusions before reading others’. But with news, I find myself looking to see what others say before I make up my mind.
Media fast day #1 is showing me that I can come up with my own opinion about Barack Obama’s victory sans three columnists telling me what I should think about it and all the major implications thereof.
#3 Playing toy animals with a 4-year-old is quite fun
Cutting out some TV, I instead played animals with my daughter. I mean WOW! That kid does a spot on imitation of me and her teachers at school. She thinks I’m a zebra.
I thought I should be the lion, but nope…zebra.. There you have it. In the animal kingdom, I’m a zebra. Her teacher, however, got to be a tiger. My daughter was a small tiger.
I think I preferred it when my daughter was on a Star Wars kick and I got to be the Emperor.
#4 Lost is a cool show
I picked up the first season of Lost on DVD. I took in 45 minutes of TV this evening and watched an episode. Cool show.
I’ll tell you though. It pained me to listen to Daniel Dae Kim’s Korean. I’m sure most Americans don’t know, but I certainly hear the difference in his Korean and Kim Yunjin’s. No matter though. I liked Daniel Dae Kim in Crusade, so I won’t hold his Korean ability against him too much.
#5 Somewhere out there is LeBron James still getting disrespected?
Of course, my protest continues! Because I am not reading any sports pages, I have no idea whether or not LeBron is getting any respect. I assume he is not. But this media fast continues until LeBron James is shown some respect.
Those are my thoughts for today. I’ll keep you posted on this media fast and you can read more on how it is affecting my work and my life.
I’m about to tell you something that I am not proud of. Are you sitting down? Here goes:
I am a junkie.
An information junkie. Troubled by a lack of production recently, I decided to track my internet usage. And lo and behold (though don’t tell this to my current employer) I spend WAY too much time looking at news sites. I then go crawling through to other sites and next thing you know, I’ve been reading news sites for over an hour.
And what was the result? I simply read six different people’s opinions about whether Roger Clemens was telling the truth about steroids—nary a one of them defending ol’ Roger.
So, what can I do about it?
Well, I’ve decided to take the advice of one Tim Ferriss, writer of the Four Hour Workweek. Tim spoke at South by Southwest last year at the same time I did. And let me say, this is one of my favorite books of non-fiction. I’ve been re-reading it recently, and he has an entire chapter on a low-information diet.
Tim recommends cultivating “selective ignorance.” This means acquiring information that is “actionable” and being ignorant of the rest (or simply ask knowledgeable people on a subject).
Like me, Tim really doesn’t buy into the whole time management concept, as much as he says that “time management” is a process of eliminating wasteful activities. I quite agree.
So, I have decided to battle my own demons here. In the past, I turned off my internet connection when I worked. This is a great method. But it’s time I battle this head-on.
To that end, I am going on a one-week media fast. According to Tim Ferriss, a media fast means:
1. No news web sites (so long WSJ, MSNBC, Slate, please not Fark.com too)
2. No newspapers, magazines, audio books, or talk radio.
3. No television, except one hour of pleasure viewing each night.
4. No reading except for Tim’s book and one hour of fiction.
5. No web surfing unless it’s necessary to complete a task for that day.
I shutter just thinking of these. How will I find out about the Hillary-Obama showdown? How will I know about what happened to Roger Clemens? In Ferriss’ book, he recommends taking 5 minutes to read some headlines and asking people what’s going on. As for me, part of my job is writing an educational program based on the news, hence I tend to go to sites in order to confirm some information only to find myself NEVER getting off.
So, I will limit my news intake to only that which my job requires: listening to a 4-minute headline news broadcast and reading tow Korea-related news articles. And that’ll be that.
But some will be easy. I don’t really watch TV unless you count the half-hour of Power Rangers I should endure in the evenings with my daughter. There’s nothing I love more than watching the Japanese version of Power Rangers with Korean dubbing over the top!
But I do read a lot of fiction. Tim and I will agree to disagree on the role of fiction. He finds it’s good to put you to sleep, but I find fiction triggers the creative process.
I will document how my media fast is going. And you will see if it boosts my productivity any more than it is now.
Shouldn’t I be fasting in protest of something?
As I am about to end this post, it occurs to me that shouldn’t I be fasting in protest of something? I think personal development is great cause in and of itself. And going on a media fast to increase productivity is great.
But I mean, think about it. All the other great fasters fasted for a great cause. Every time I read in the news about someone fasting, it is in protest of something. So, I think I’ll come up with a noble cause to go along with my media fast.
I guess I could say this is about protesting the media. But I kind of like the media. Why don’t I use my last few minutes before fasting to get on a news site and find a cause worthy of my media fast.
Let’s see…world news…Darfur, war, poverty…too heavy for this kind of fast…
I’m a basketball fan, so there it is folks. From today, I am going on a one-week media fast to protest the media’s lack of respect for LeBron James and his team. Since the media has upset LeBron James, I too am upset.
(cue the rage) How dare the media criticize LeBron’s team! They made it all the way to the finals last year for Pete’s sake (only to get beaten by my beloved San Antonio Spurs).
But you wouldn’t know that by the way the media totally disrespects LeBron James. I’ve had enough!
I will continue this fast until the media starts showing LeBron the respect he deserves. And I am sure after my one-week fast I can google up a puff piece on LeBron, but until I do so–I am fasting.
Wish me luck.
I have never been the most organized person in the world. And I will go on record right now to say that I have been known to be easily distracted.
My desktop reflects this tendency. Many times I’ve looked at this giant mass of programs running as I creatively think of ways to shut them down. Or how many times have I been doing something (like writing this blog post), glanced at my open internet browser and just started surfing…uh, I mean, researching?
It happens to a lot of us. But with desktops getting more “gadgetized” I have found some free tools that help you to “devolve” your computer.
I call them computer Zen. I’ve heard the term Zenware. And that’s exactly what these programs do. They seek to save us from ourselves. They seek to aid the ADHD user that dwells within us. And help they do.
There are a lot of programs out there nowadays that help you to stay focused on what you’re doing. And I wanted to share with you some of the tools I used to help me stay focused on my work.
1. Swept Away
Cool program that hides programs that are on your desktop that you are not using. The only drawback is if you do get distracted and start surfing internet sites, Swept Away will “sweep away” the work you are supposed to be doing so you can focus better on being distracted.
All in all though, it works well.
2. Dropcloth
Cool little app that overlays a solid window over your desktop. Out of sight out of mind. This app covers that cluttered desktop. Use it in conjunction with Swept Away, like I do, and watch your focus go WAY up.
3. Dark Room
MS Word. Love it, but man it distracts the you-know-what out of me. I fiddle with margins and formatting like you wouldn’t believe. Enter Darkroom. With its retro green monochrome with the flickering cursor, it keeps me focused on one thing and one thing only—writing. Guess what I’m writing this post on right now?
Those are a few tools, and I know there are more out there. If you know of any, please comment and let my readers know.
A book fell on my hand! It literally came crashing down smacking my right hand and sending my co-workers rushing to my rescue. To gain maximum sympathy, I acted as if my hand was broken and would have to go to the hospital at any moment.
After a couple of minutes of method acting, and my co-workers leaving me to my misery, I wanted to discover how it was that a book (a thick usage dictionary) came to land on my hand.
Well, it was little crazy actually…
OK. I’ve gotten two kinds of reactions from the words “Possess Less”. Some people think I’m trying to get them to join some kind of cult (not true…by the way), while others see it as simply a way of frugal living. The truth is it’s more than that. In this podcast, I tell you exactly what “possessing less” means to me, and how my concept of possessing less just might be the way to happiness you are looking for.
So, now we’ve seen how checking e-mail frequently and chatting on instant messengers murder your productivity and efficiency. Now, we come to my personal demon. The demon that could turn a one-hour job into a 4-hour job. The demon that caused the sands of production to run right through my fingers. The demon that interrupted EVERY SINGLE PROJECT I had ever worked on.
That demon was…
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Yesterday, you learned how checking e-mail can murder your work efficiency and production. But in our quest to be more productive, there is another activity that can derail even our best efforts at work. An activity that if left unchecked could leave you at the end of the day wondering just what the heck you were doing.
What could it be?
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Some years ago as I sat in my office after a long 12-hour day, I sat and pondered something deeply.
How was it that I sat there at my desk all day and managed to do absolutely nothing. Nada. Zip. Not one iota of work.
But I had been so busy all day. How was it that I completed nothing.
Certainly, I had done something, right? I was super-busy all day. The only problem was that all the things I was doing had nothing to do with work.
Welcome to a typical day in the life of the busy, yet unproductive. That was your glimpse into the reflections of a worker who did not exist. He was simply a figment of the imagination of the payroll department that cut checks to this “worker” who did very little, if any, work.
But it was not my fault really. The problem was that I really couldn’t figure out what I was doing with my time. I had no idea why I wasn’t getting any work done. And let me tell you when I set up my own business I had to figure it out quick or I would have gone broke in the
Does this sound familiar?
Well, in this 4-part series I will present to you the 3 things that I found had cut most deeply into my work production and how I solved all of them in one fail swoop (after a lot of trial and error). Needles to say, they all involved my computer.
The key to existing more is having more time to do the things that are important. And we can’t do that until we learn to be more productive and shed the “activities” that prevent us from using our time wisely.
Let’s start with the first of these murderers of production:
Production Murderer #1: Checking E-mail
I can hear the sound already. That Whoosh MS Outlook makes when I get a fresh, hot delivery. As I stated in an earlier post, though, it was usually from someone trying to sell me something, and in most cases that was my fault because I got on the person’s list in the first place.
Or how about that “urgent” e-mail from a friend that they so lovingly forwarded to me and 100 other people? I had better answer it right away before I forget about it.
I can tell you that at least once every 5 minutes I was checking my e-mail. And how much of it was urgent? Not a one. They all could have waited. In fact, 90% could have been deleted.
The truth is the people sending me e-mail were just as bored as I was. So, we sent each other e-mail all day going on about how bored we were when we should have been working.
But there is a quickie solution production murder by e-mail—turn it off.
Turn off your e-mail client. If you use Outlook, don’t open it. If you use web-based e-mail, don’t open your browser until your work is done. It’s that easy.
Some will say, “But Carlon I need to check my e-mail…that’s how I get clients.” That’s fine. But if you want to be productive, check your email at certain intervals in the day (like at 10:00 & 3:00, once every 2 hours, etc.). or check it after your most urgent task is completed. That way you can be sure not to miss any e-mails (trust me, most e-mails don’t need immediate replies) and still get some work done.
Tune in tomorrow, as I show you the second production murder and how under its smileyface-winking-sharing facade lies the potential to waste week after week of work with absolutely nothing to show for it.
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