8 Practical Tips to Cure Your Internet ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) | zen habits
8 Practical Tips to Cure Your Internet ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)
This is a guest post from Alex Brie of Hack the Day.
You know you have it - every nerd does - the tickling sensation in the left hand to press Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab to switch apps, Internet browser tabs or windows, to go from your email to Firefox, Instant Messenger, Twitter, your current work and back to Firefox.
No matter what you do, it seems like nothing is important enough to prevent you from writing a brief IM message to your best bud about what the latest joke your office mates have just sent you by email.
Nothing is too important that can’t wait till after you play a quick online flash game or read another blog post while your boss is out of the room.
Internet Attention Deficit Disorder is the productivity killer affecting most office workers today - the stringent urge to “browse just a little more” in between your daily work tasks; to peek at the Digg homepage, check out the hottest YouTube video of the day, skim through your blog feeds reading what happened in the last hour, to jump eagerly whenever Outlook or Mail.app alert you of new mail and interrupt all activity when you get via IM a link to a funny picture.
Sure, GTD, Zen To Done and most other productivity methods try to help you manage your priorities better and ignore the insignificant. But how could you ever do this if there’s always “one more” blog post to read, “one more” IM to answer, “one more” twitter status to check out?
Enter our brief list of tips to detect, manage, contain and even cure the Internet ADD. Here on Zen Habits you’ve read plenty of tips on how to focus on the most important tasks of the day and ignore the trivial things. But now we’ll look at tips to do that, aimed specifically at the Internet ADD:
8 Practical Tips to Cure Your Internet ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)
This is a guest post from Alex Brie of Hack the Day.
You know you have it - every nerd does - the tickling sensation in the left hand to press Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab to switch apps, Internet browser tabs or windows, to go from your email to Firefox, Instant Messenger, Twitter, your current work and back to Firefox.
No matter what you do, it seems like nothing is important enough to prevent you from writing a brief IM message to your best bud about what the latest joke your office mates have just sent you by email.
Nothing is too important that can’t wait till after you play a quick online flash game or read another blog post while your boss is out of the room.
Internet Attention Deficit Disorder is the productivity killer affecting most office workers today - the stringent urge to “browse just a little more” in between your daily work tasks; to peek at the Digg homepage, check out the hottest YouTube video of the day, skim through your blog feeds reading what happened in the last hour, to jump eagerly whenever Outlook or Mail.app alert you of new mail and interrupt all activity when you get via IM a link to a funny picture.
Sure, GTD, Zen To Done and most other productivity methods try to help you manage your priorities better and ignore the insignificant. But how could you ever do this if there’s always “one more” blog post to read, “one more” IM to answer, “one more” twitter status to check out?
Enter our brief list of tips to detect, manage, contain and even cure the Internet ADD. Here on Zen Habits you’ve read plenty of tips on how to focus on the most important tasks of the day and ignore the trivial things. But now we’ll look at tips to do that, aimed specifically at the Internet ADD:
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