The Stealth Murderer of Productivity Part 3 of How to Be More Productive And Eliminate Useless Activities That Murder Efficiency

By Carlon Haas | July 12, 2007

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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…

Production Murderer #3: Reading Internet News Sites

Here was a day in the life: go to msnbc.com, then jump over to CNN, and then Yahoo News and so on and so on. And what did I read? Pretty much the same stories over and over again.

But wildfires are raging, it’s flooding, and somewhere in the world there’s a war going on…clearly all this is so important that I need to read it over and over again all on different news sites, right? And I need to read all the varying opinion of the effects of wildfires on global warming, the economy, and a far-off war. And then I need to head over to the blogosphere to hear what Jack from Canada has to say on the issue. I really really need to know what is going on in the world!

Well…not really. What I found is that most of these sites get their stories from the AP, so they all sound fairly similar. And news, for the most part, is the product of very bored people looked for something to say. If you don’t believe me, mosey on over to www.fark.com. You’ll see some of the things that pass for news these days.

So, how did I resist the temptation to go to news sites every other minute? Mind you, my job required me to know have a good knowledge of news, so I couldn’t just stop cold turkey.

So, I did 2 things that helped:

1. Deleted news sites from my favorites (and removed Yahoo from my home page to stop myself from clicking on the latest headline). You’d be surprised how having to type in a URL cuts down on your news site surfing. By not being able to see the temptation before my eyes, I went there less and less.
2. Set up a 30-minute block of time in the morning to read news. I’m a fast reader, and in 30 minutes I pretty much got most of the important things going around. This usually gave me time to scan headlines, read an expose in Newsweek or Time, and to read one of my favorite sports columns every Monday and Tuesday. Some say that 30 minutes a day is too much. But I like reading news and don’t watch any TV news whatsoever. And by giving myself a set amount of time to read news, I found over the course of a 2-week period of doing this that not much happens in the day that requires immediate attention. Everything I needed to know could wait till tomorrow. And wait it did.

So, there you have it. Three activities that murder work efficiency. In the last part of the series, I will show you a simple solution that can take care of this and pretty much any computerized distraction. In fact, when I employed it, my efficiency jumped almost 300%.

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