Long story in the NYT, via Brad Feld's blog, about life in today's workplace, marked by the phenomenon of continuous partial attention from the various distractions we face, some of which are actually productive. The Web & email catalyzed this for me. I remember my first job out of college at a strategy consulting firm. We used email but voicemail was often a preferred mode of communication. Moreover, there wasn't much to surf on the Web and so it didn't really impact our work, positively or negatively. We used resources like Lexis-Nexis instead.
Today, it's a much different story. The article has a passage in which a tech writer, Danny O'Brien, questioned 70 of the most productive people he knew about how they got so much stuff done, which I found particularly illuminating. I use Post-its to track my tasks, a whiteboard to track longer-term projects, and my calendar to schedule tasks. My email inbox is my 'hot potato' tray. Anything in it needs to be dealt with. If it's less urgent, I may file it away and schedule a time in my calendar to deal with it.
I still need to be better about focusing attention when needed, and have also been meaning to check out Backpack or other personal productivity solutions...sounds like a task to schedule in my calendar...
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