Productivity tips for the easily distracted
jacquesmattheij.com
Productivity tips for the easily distracted
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#2I don't think "(from Jacques)" is quite required... we can all see the URL of the site.
Other than that, great article - each person will have their own unique system for dealing with distractions... this one is quite elaborate, but whatever works, works!
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#3Nice approach. Remind me of the OfficePod [1] discussed at HN [2] about one year ago. The used trailer is much more affordable (less than $1000?) than the OfficePod, which costs a whopping 25K.
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#4excellent
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#5How does he get his monitors to go vertical like that? Is there some rotation software (for Linux)?
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#6How does he get his monitors to go vertical like that? Is there some rotation software (for Linux)?
xrandr (use "xrandr --output --rotate (normal|right|left|inverted)", e.g. "xrandr --output DVI1 --rotate right")
Ubuntu also has a graphical tool for this, probably also other distributions.
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#7Productivity tip: buy a caravan. Gotta admit, that's the first time I've seen that one.
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#8Nice approach. Remind me of the OfficePod [1] discussed at HN [2] about one year ago. The used trailer is much more affordable (less than $1000?) than the OfficePod, which costs a whopping 25K. [1] http://www.officepod.co.uk [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1069526
Depending on what shape the caravan is in, you might be able to find someone who'll pay you to drag it off their land.
And as a bonus, you'll get some free rodents.
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#9Productivity tip: buy a caravan. Gotta admit, that's the first time I've seen that one.
Indeed, not usually applicable to urban living. But the main points come through, namely, find a place to work where you can get away from life distractions and gear it so that it is conceptually/aesthetically separated from the rest of your life; then have some ritual which signifies when it's work time. Mark Boulton in (_Designing for the Web_) has a separate, work-only room in his house, and his ritual is to keep his shoes on during the day (work time) and take them off when he's done (home time).
Re: Productivity tips for the easily distracted
#10I wonder how Jacques avoids the Internet distractions in his new setup as he still has a network connection.
I am also the kind of person who gets distracted rather easily as I have a really broad spectrum of hobbies/interests. I've tried some similar approaches without much success.
Back in old days when I was still a graduate student, I had a paper deadline due in a few days, but I was addictive in Slashdot discussion then. I experimented fully command line work environment: no browsers, no X-windows, only a few linux consoles you can switch among by pressing Alt-Fx. The transition was painful, as I had to look for command line equivalent to view pdf/ps/eps files, gdb is not as convenient as ddd, etc. However, my productivity gain was enormous, at least for the first a few days. The curve quickly flattened and began to fall, as I started to use command line browsers such as lynx/links and I discovered a few legacy games.
Another time I went even further: screw the Internet! I installed Slackware onto an old dell notebook and uninstalled all fun games and apps, unplug the wireless card and went to the public library nearby for a day. Almost the same result, I had done lots of task at an amazing speed initially. Then, I got bored, and wrote a frame-buffer based Galaga-like shooting game and played/improved it for the rest of the day.