Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category
Driven to distraction
I got distracted while reading this caused I tried to read it while working, but this is a glorious piece of pop-neurology: In Defense of Distraction, by Sam Anderson.
Some highlights:
“People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana”
“The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction.”
The best part was that there was no mention of the Stroop Effect. If I see or hear about that one more time in a pop-neurology article or book or in a library science article or book, I may scream.
Update to last post
I might just be in love with the Remember the Milk plug-in for Google Calendar. This does what I need in a simple way, since before I was manually entering individual to-do items into my “all day” section on Google Calendar, and then typing “DONE:” before the item when it was done. This was pretty clunky, and I like my new system much better.
Non-productive productivity
Today, in between researching the legal and tax issues that go along with fiscal sponsorship (long story), I switched productivity software. I was using Next Action, I am now using Remember the Milk.
A lot of people will tell you not to do this, since it’s just a fancy way of wasting time. But it was a long time coming, and here’s my reasoning. Next Action, while being very small and convenient on one computer, isn’t at all mobile, since it runs purely off Google Gears based on your own computer. That worked for a long time for me, but lately I’ve needed something that will follow me around, since I’m having to accomplish more in more places. Clearly, a piece of paper is the simplest of all, but if I have to do the same thing at the same time each week, then a computer will do the boring work of writing it down for me.
I’m excited about Remember the Milk because while it is web based, it also runs off Google Gears for off-line access. It also has a variety of reminder systems, including SMS, which would be incredibly useful for me. I think it will be robust enough to do what I want but not onerous to set up. So there’s some productive productivity.
P.S. I did do my research before messing with productivity software, so in the end the most important thing for today did get done!