Get more time #2: Don't be a slave to the Internet

16th August 2009

"The Internet contains everything in the whole wide world ever. I don't know about you, but I find everything in the whole wide world ever to be a bit distracting" - Dave Gorman

The Internet is the most brilliant and sophisticated time wasting invention in the known universe. Even worse than TV.

While some of the 19 hours a week that we average online is productive, much of it serves only to push our own psychological buttons. On your deathbed, will you look back and cry "I wish I'd spent more time throwing sheep on Facebook"?

Notifications are the root of all evil

The Internet is masterful at distracting you endlessly. Come quick - Alyssa Milano has eaten breakfast!

Worst still, our primitive human brains are wired to tell ourselves these interruptions are a good thing, like we're somehow more 'connected'.

To gain a frankly embarrassing amount of free time, turn off all your notifications. This includes:

• Disable email alerts for Facebook, Twitter and other social sites
• Turn off slide-in alerts and sounds for instant messaging
• Remove any widgets which tell you when anything new happens automatically

The aim is to switch from being notified ('push') to requesting updates ('pull'). In practice, this means you can live without knowing the latest from Facebook until you have time to look at it.

Make email your whiny little bitch

Men have spent entire days just massaging your email, and accomplishing nothing. This is how to stop:

• Turn off automatic email downloads
  Unless your job is just replying to email, you really don't need to know the split second an email comes in. Turning off downloads means new distractions don't even exist until you're ready to deal with them.
  
• Check email about two times a day, and let people know this
  Personally I use lunchtime and late afternoon. At these times, email gets my full attention. It may help to use an email auto responder, that says something like:
  
• "Thank you for your email. To maximise my productivity, I only check my email twice a day: around 1pm and 5pm (GMT). This means I spend more time getting work done, and less being distracted by email. If your request is urgent, please call me on ..."
  
• Filter the good
  Setup rules that detect your most worthy email, and put it into separate folders. For example, email from my clients goes into separate areas to my staff, recruitments, accounting etc. I can then divert more attention to these folders. Anything that isn't picked up by a filter is probably spam, and I look at that last and less frequently.
  
• Read and act once
  If you look at email but don't do anything about it, you're going to waste more time looking at the email again later. Try to always act on the email when it is read: forward it, reply to it, delete it, archive it, or create an action from it (i.e. write something down in your calendar / to-do list). Really, you should just read GTD.
  
• Separate work and personal email
  For the love of all that is holy, make sure you have a separate personal and work email address (entrepreneurs, I'm talking to you - it took me 4 years to learn this lesson). If something comes through to the wrong one, forward it and delete immediately. Watch that YouTube video at home, and deal with the client request at work.

Fight your website addiction

Chances are you have a website you can spend all day on, and often do, but wish you didn't.

Depending on how strong you are, these steps can help:

1. Log out, and don't click "Remember me"
   This is easy. You can still access the site, but it's just a little bit harder to do. If you keep at it, you'll find yourself visiting less, and with more of a reason when you do.
2. Block yourself
   There are free plugins which will stop you accessing certain websites at certain times, like Twitter between 9 - 5. If you have separate work / personal computers, you can simply block certain websites entirely on one.
3. Close your account
   A last resort. If you really can't stop, make it impossible to continue. And remind yourself how much more time you have for the gym now you don't spend all day on Flickr.

Use RescueTime

A brilliant and free tool, RescueTime measures what you do on your computer in the background, and reports on the results.

Install it now, and try not to spend all your day looking at it (of course, if you do, it'll tell you).

Practice good information hygiene

You don't need all that information. Most of it is a dirty, stinking waste of time, and you know it.

By saying no to all that is unimportant, you free time for what really matters.

So enough throwing sheep already.

 

See Part I: Rethink television.