BrunoMiranda.com

Sometimes it takes an extreme measure to change something, for better or worse.

I have reached my limit regarding time wasters. This rant is not about being productive, achieving the most amount of stuff in the least amount of time. This is about ‘less’.

Ridding life of things that create open loops in the brain, things that feed distractions. I have been dabbling with the idea that some of the goals I would like to achieve have been put on hold because of useless stuff I decide to spend my time on. Albeit usually fun, these sort of activities are not rewarding in the sense that I search for at this moment.

I cringe every time I hear people praise being busy, or proud themselves regarding their workaholic ways of living. Trust me I know the feeling, I used to answer: “Busy” to the commonly asked question of: “How are you?” - I now find that to be the absolute most ridiculous answer.

Achieving productivity to me at this point is more about effectiveness than efficiency. Someone who reads 10,000 emails a day can theoretically be highly efficient, but terribly ineffective. And that is just one example. Being busy is out of style, I want to bethe opposite of busy, which in my book is: focused.

How much can I really accomplish by focusing, one thing at a time?

Expending all my energy into a narrow channel with the expectancy of a pre-calculated outcome? That is my current question. I have touched on the subject on this blog before. How much time I find myself spending on “necessary” (notice the quotes) daily distractions such as RSS, E-mail, Twitter, IM; the total is exorbitant, upwards of 60% of the day.

Over the past couple years I have tried to achieve certain goals on a personal/professional level and feel that I have come short on certain ones. I will not blame online A.D.D for it all but I see it as a major contributing factor. For this reason I will be conduction an experiment for the entire month of September as such:

• Time wasters such as RSS feeds are to be completely excluded.
• I will excuse myself from IM and only use Skype at work and keep the conversations as succinct as humanly possibly.
• Keep campfire usage to absolute minimum (I use campfire at work).
• Twitter will be checked once in the morning when I wake up and before bed (This will give me a nice overview of each day).
• Stick to reading fiction books which relax the mind.
• Spend my 2 hour daily commute listening to fiction audio books or music which excite the brain and boost creativity.
• Drastically limit the amount of email I send and limit email checking to once per day.
• Disable ALL notifications (growl) to prevent distractions.
• Keep non work related web surfing to a minimum.

I have chosen to take a relatively strict approach but have kept it realistic and achievable. The goal of this experiment is to track how much more I can achieve with distractions and time wasters turned off. I do realize this will be relatively difficult to measure as the ‘control’ is subjective. I will however have a very good gut feeling of my level of personal/professional accomplishments at the end of the month. Here is what I will be looking at:

• Have I done more focused work and accomplished tangible results?
• How do those results compare to the previous months?
• How is my general mood towards work, software development?
• How happy I feel on a general level? How does that compare to the previous months?
• How easy has it been to stick to the information diet?
• Have I achieved my clearly defined goals more quickly and with higher quality?

I will be putting the items above to the test by setting a clear path to action. One important thing to remember is to not force anything. If I don’t feel like doing something, I will simply not do it.