It’s ironic that computers, whose very purpose for existence is to increase your efficiency, are so very incredibly efficient at making you waste time. Like any good tool, if you decide to make it do something, they will do it quickly and well – get my work done? Sure! Find ways for me to get loads of dopamine by obsessively checking social websites, email, and various other time sinks? Absolutely! With great power comes great responsibility and all that, and if you aren’t too careful, you’ll find yourself where I have been, far too many times – wondering how you got derailed from the middle of your project about 20 minutes ago.
Rather than gnashing your teeth and spending another 20 minutes reading up on the benefits of Neo-Luddism, turn all that great power towards defeating the time-sink beast. Here are some tools you might not be familiar with:
At the top of the list is Vitamin R by Public Space – it’s a perfect example that simple things done very well are often the surest path to getting them done at all.
It has the simplest of premises – take your larger tasks and break them down into very short, manageable slices with distinct objectives. Their argument is that our short term memory can only hold 4 – 6 chunks of information, and that when we get interrupted, we lose that. Thus, focus on one task intensely for 10 – 15 minutes, and then reward yourself with a similar chunk of time to do anything you want. The rewards builds a positive relationship to focus and accomplishing specific things, providing encouragement to do it again.
Part of the genius here is that rather than fight our desire to be distracted, it works with it, and turns that tendency into a positive trait. There is an excellent slideshow here that gives a quick demonstration of how Vitamin R works. As an added bonus, Vitamin R integrates with a number of applications, including the most useful one of all time, OmniFocus.
Taking this all a step further is Concentrate from Rocket. Concentrate works in a similar manner to many other task applications by letting you define your goal and a time for it, and, when you are ready to tackle the task, it brings a number of impressive tools to bear. These include, but are not limited to: blocking certain websites, quitting certain applications, automatically opening others you need for the task, or opening documents you might need. That by itself is pretty nifty, but it’s also able, for the tech-savvy amongst us (or for those of us who can hire tech savvy people to help!), to also fire off AppleScripts, which means you can automate a whole host of other task-related things. For example, if you were working on a newsletter, you could have Concentrate automatically quit everything but your favorite layout application, block any emails from coming in, open up your Newsletters folder on your computer, along with mounting a network folder you might store newsletter resources on. Then, as you work, it would remind you at intervals which task you are working on, in case the phone or another person distracted you. These are simple things, but again, it’s the simple things that make a difference. Checking Facebook every five minutes is simple too, and look how effective that is at keeping you from getting anything done at all.
A free (and even simpler) alternative is the aptly named Self Control by Steve Lambert. Self Control is very simple – you tell it which websites to block, and it will keep them from working for the specified duration – and nothing you can do will change that.
If you’re an obsessive article reader (like me), Instapaper might be just the ticket; if it saves you even a quarter of the time it did me, you’ll think you’re on vacation. Instapaper takes procrastination and turns that into a productivity tool! It accomplishes this crafty trick by letting you add a simple Read Later to your bookmarks bar, which you hit when coming across interesting things on the web. Then, at a time that might be more appropriate (like, oh, I don’t know, not at work) you can pull up Instapaper on any of the many devices that it supports – computer, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, etc. – and read whatever article it was in beautifully rendered text. An account with them is free, and it’s a no brainer. Apple’s Safari attempts something similar with it’s ‘Enter Reader’ function, but all that does is remove ads and give you a nice format for reading the article; Instapaper’s power lies in stockpiling all the fascinating things you were going to read until you actually have time to read them.
Last on the list is something that is specific in nature, but in my experience, pretty effective: WriteRoom. There are a number of programs that do what WriteRoom does, but I favor both its focus and elegance. Developed by Hog Bay Software, WriteRoom is a barebones text editing application that fills your entire screen with nothing but your background of choice and the text you are writing. Not even little distracting editing buttons to make you fritter away time by thinking gee, what if that sentence looked better in Palatino Bold? Nothing but you and your text – the ultimate in Zen authorship, and, you will find, very calming. Seeing your task in isolated full screen glory makes it immediately more personal, and if you don’t try out any of the other suggestions here, you should check this one out. It’s tiny, it’s free, and it’s so simple it works.