Newsflash: I spend too much time online being unproductive. As do most of us. I'm easily distracted and immensely curious, so I can spend hours browsing from site to site.
I'm doing 2 things to combat this.
(1) I have downloaded www.RescueTime.com to track where and how I spend all my computer time. It seems like a great free application, which will give me plenty of data about exactly how unproductive I am being. Great.
(2) I'm going back to making lists. Lists for the week and lists for the day. This keeps me focused on just those things that I need to get accomplished. I need more focus.
Bonus Points: for my upcoming San Diego escape vacation, I'm toying with the idea of not taking my macbook with me. 8 whole days without my laptop? That would be really hard, but maybe it will shift my focus. Because I'm realizing that while I'm taking IN a whole lot of information online, I'm spending much less time doing productive work that results in output.
Too much input = not enough output.
Herbert Simon (winner of nobel prize in economics) says this all better than me:
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
The short version of that quote = a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
This describes so much of our modern world.... we have a poverty of attention.
Does porn count as unproductive?
ReplyDeleteWell it depends. Typically, something that is productive results in output...
ReplyDelete