In the zone?


For lots and lots of people who spend a significant part of their lives online have become aware that more and more of their time gets filled with the white noise of busy-work, and less and less with being focused on the tasks at hand. Jason Fried, in a post from April 2006 titled How to Shut up and Get to Work, attempts to deal with this problem:
When you have a long stretch where you aren’t bothered, you can get in the zone. The zone is when you are most productive. It’s when you don’t have to mindshift between various tasks. It’s when you aren’t interrupted to answer a question or look up something or send an email or answer an im. The alone zone is where real progress is made.
Fried's thoughts seem to have hit a live nerve. Although his posting is from eight months ago, it still seems to receive responses and comments - 96 as of this writing. Almost all of these are favorable. It's hard to tell with one responder, however, whether he's being serious or tongue in cheek. He comments:
One thing that has improved my workflow is to set my ’send and receive’ to grab mails only every 15 mins. If it’s set to every 5 mins I can’t stop myself clicking on the tiny envelope that appears when I get new mail. And if I really have stuff to do I just quit Entourage. Harsh but necessary.
Fifteen minutes between automatic mail checks? That's like kicking the habit cold turkey! It would seem that all's fair in the struggle to actually accomplish something. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with being in that zone ... as long as we remember that we really don't want to spend our whole day there.



Go to: Now. Right now!