How I focus
I found this article interesting, take this snip-it for example:
Clay Shirky can be counted among the lucky few who not only appear to have mastered the wired world (and the wireless one) but also get paid to decode it for the rest of us. He teaches graduate courses in interactive telecommunications at New York University. He writes online essays that bag countless links. He has a busy technology consulting practice whose clients include Nokia and the Library of Congress.
Yet faced with the unlimited distractions of a Digital Age– e-mail, smart phones, killing time in the blogosphere–Shirky was getting nowhere recently on an important book proposal. Until one day he found himself working on it underground, riding the R train from his home in Brooklyn to NYU’s campus in Manhattan. “Suddenly I was flying,” he says. “I thought, Why get off the subway now?” He stayed on the train as it rumbled through Manhattan and into Queens. Thirty-two extra stops later (16 each way), he emerged victorious. Score: Shirky 1, distraction 0.
In my case I use a slightly different approach
- I partition my day
- I use different devices for different activities:
- I use my Tablet for reading
- I use my desktop when working on complex documents, hosting web conferences, assembling complex presentations, going through my blog scanning process
- I use my laptop when I want to focus on just one task, normally writing or mind mapping, or when listening into conference calls
Being a home worker I tend to use these different devices in different places:
- My 3 screen desktop in my office
- My Tablet when I am out of the house
- My laptop when I am working anywhere in the house or garden, except my office
- My Treo when I want quicker access than my Tablet can provide, or when I don’t have it with me
I have each device optimised for its primary task, they are all synchronised with each other automatically and I can access any of them with a single click using remote desktop.
