Singletasking by Caterina Fake (photo)

[coglethorpe]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/caterina/3270176074/

[ryanwaggoner]

This is a handy PDF guide to this principle that I found useful:

http://practicalist.com/singletasking.pdf

[dodeca]

I put together a background of this a month or so back: http://sponge-ing.com/post/83361398/an-image-of-a-whiteboard...

[there → dodeca]

horus?

[dodeca → there]

I need to correct that spelling error. Eeek.

[Timothee]

I have seen it before and, like last time, I really think I should follow some of this... I'm very bad at single-tasking and it doesn't help at all getting things done.

[edw519]

This looks like treating the effect, not the cause.

What's the cause of allowing yourself to be distracted so much? Not focusing enough on your core work.

Once you focus on the most important thing, you'll be too busy to be distracted.

If you're not focusing on the most important thing, your problems are too big to be solved with a white board gimmick.

[antirez]

My inbox is a monster. Usually I've something like 4000 emails in my gmail inbox, I read most of the things, reply almost only to very important emails if I'm busy. All the rest is a flow - like twitter.

Email is not a serious thing this days. It is too simple to send one, and people keep writing emails about things not important, or that are trivial to figure without any help, containing a lot more words than needed to express an otherwise simple message and so on.

Do you really want to pass half of your life reading/writing emails about things that don't interest you? I don't want. This is one of the things that may affect your work performance in a critical way.

[jlees → antirez]

My gmail inbox used to be like that until a friend of mine, visiting me, got so annoyed with it he archived the lot (with my permission).

Trying to stick at inbox zero after that has been a definite improvement, but it does make for painful periods when I'm away for a day and come back to a ton of unread rubbish I'd normally just archive as soon as it came in. Theoretically select-all-unread-archive is easier than interrupting focus, archive, resuming focus, but the mental burden of 200+ unread messages is not to be underestimated.

[antirez → jlees]

Argh... now my inbox is "zero" too, and you gave me the illusion that I can keep it this way. But I know that in few weeks it will be a mess again ;)

[jedc]

Of course for this to work, you have to have someone at/near the top that believes in it!

(...says someone who used to work in a place that would have gotten me fired if I had worked like this.)