In December 2005, Paul Graham published an excellent essay entitled “Good and Bad Procrastination.”  It is an essay that is worth revisiting from time to time.  In it, he argued that at all times we can work on one of three things: a) nothing, b) things that are less important, and c) things that are…

These days, everyone has too much on their minds. Gone are the days when woke up, went to the factory, put in your time, came home, and sat down with a selection from the three TV shows on that night. Gone, too, are the days when a long-distance call from grandma in Wisconsin was an…

Using “concentric defenses” to keep off interruptions you can’t avoid in other ways Most of the articles you read about dealing with time- and attention-wasting distractions concentrate on avoiding them altogether (shutting yourself away, better organization, better time allocation) or not adding to their number yourself (minimizing responding to e-mails and IMs, filtering phone calls, avoiding…

It’s amazing how so many people do so little work. I know that I personally can waste time with the best of them, losing hours to meaningless email, workplace chatter and random meetings that accomplish next to nothing. As I’m rarely wasting time by myself, perhaps you or others can relate? One of the…

It’s eye-opening when you realize that many of the interruptions that occur in your day may actually be under your own control! In no particular order, here are the top ten interruptions we see most often with our clients that are affecting their productivity: 1. Phone Calls Schedule some time to have calls screened by a…

The day has come. If you think email, IM, blogs, RSS, MySpace are the king of interruptions – try again. Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users introduces a service called Twitter which is basically a community answering one simple question: “What are you doing?” Not that I am impressed by the service, but the article…

I promised that this second installment would deal with cellphone calls. Cellphones are useful, but they can also be extremely distracting. You don’t want to stop genuinely useful calls reaching you. You do want to exclude calls that will waste your time.

Interruption is always a hot topic in productivity. Brian Donnelly at The Herald nails down some facts on office interruptions. A study shows modern day staff work for just 11 minutes before they get interrupted by emails, phone or colleague. The study also shows it needs on average of 25 minutes to return to the…

Without concentration, you may not be efficient with the task on hand. And most of the time, the lack of concentration is because there are interruptions from different sources around you – like instant messenger and mobile etc. Babak Farrokhi over at Geek Style has given some suggestions on killing the interruptions around us. Stuff…

One of the great journalists, Clive Thompson has written a good piece on interruptions we faced at work. This is a serious issue for us at work, especially there are different sort of ways on distracting us – your computer, mobile phone, PDA, your colleagues, your boss… Think about when you need to tackle…