My Productivity Advice

Computers might very well be both a blessing and curse to our society. The Internet has improved communication thousands of times over and with continuous improvements in speed and design it seems to be improving exponentially.

That is for some definition of improving. As a software engineer working with largely network-based systems, I am right at the forefront for all of this. My day job consists of building faster and more innovative ways to make you, the lowly consumer, buy more stuff you don’t need.

But since something has to put food on the table, and I actually do enjoy it, I find myself in front of a computer far more than eight hours a day typing, reading, scrolling, and reading some more. I always have at least one web browser open, ten chat windows, a code editor of some kind, and a terminal window. For all of us desk jockeys toiling away at our networked computer screens, the siren’s song of information is never more than a click away.

Have you ever thought about why you keep finding yourself wanting to check Facebook? Or why you know you shouldn’t but you find clever ways to rationalize reading the latest tweets in your feed? It’s all about dopamine. Whenever you go to check for some new information whether it be on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, or any of those other ugly time sucks your brain releases a hit of dopamine as soon as you read something new. This is not unlike chemically what happens in your brain when you take a hit of cocaine.

As you check more of this information over and over you begin to crave more and more. It becomes harder to focus on a given task for longer than a few minutes. If go to work, maybe spend 10-20 minutes catching up news, the front page of Hacker News, and your Facebook feed, then continue to check back in on these things over and over throughout the day you may vary well find that you have easily spent up to half or more of your entire working day on suckling from this fire hose of a teat.

We know its wrong, but yet we still do it, over and over, day after day. It’s a not unwarranted joke that when Reddit goes down productivity among white collar workers improves.

I’m here to say there is a better way. I’m here to inform you life does not have to be like this. I’m here to tell you that you can make a measurable improvement to your happiness and quality of life by tackling this wretched demon.

Thankfully, the alcoholics from before our time have given us some tips to rid ourselves of this beast.

The first step is to admit you have a problem. I know I do. I am weak and powerless in front of these rationalized dopamine dealing drug peddlers.

The second step is to quit cold turkey. At this point you are probably skeptical of me. I was you at one point. I understand your apprehension towards this idea. I challenge you to try this just for two weeks. At the end of those two weeks you can go about your business gorging on a backlog of tweets, likes, updates, and posts.

But before we go further I’ll tackle some of your skepticism head on.

But the Pomodoro technique….

No. This is not well suited to tackling this problem. This is best suited for the manager facing a barrage of emails, phone calls, and face to face interruptions that prevent him or her from doing meaningful work in the day. Do not use the Pomodoro technique as a rationalization to allow “just a little hit.”

I’ll just limit myself to only check these things once or twice a day.

No you wont. You must admit you are weak. Checking at all will do to your mind what Buddhists describe as “stirring up the muddy water.” You need to let the dirt and debris in your mind settle, and taking in any of this pointless information is going to leave you just as bad and unfocused as when you were wasting half your day doing it. Plus, from personal experience, you will relapse.

But I will miss out on all kinds of important information.

Doubtful. In todays super connected day and age if you live in a city of any size and talk to at least one person a day you will most likely be unable to miss current world events. Someone will tell you about it, you will catch a glimpse of something on a TV on in a restaurant, you will see the headline on a newspaper as you pass by. All other information is just noise.

I’ll assume at this point you have given up your rationalization of the issue and have given in to the idea that quitting cold turkey is the only way. I will now give you a step-by-step process to help.

1. Turn off notifications on your phone for all possible apps. Email, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Farmville, all of it goes. My only exception to this is that during my on-call shift I do temporarily turn on work email notifications. Otherwise, no exceptions. While you are at it, just uninstall everything except e-mail. People who matter will call or text you. People who don’t matter will Facebook message you.
2. Turn off your TV. In fact, cancel your cable subscription right now. Even if you take nothing else away from this blog post cut the cord and don’t look back.
3.  Limit your email. I recommend only checking twice a day at most. Email is a necessary evil because it is so ingrained in our day-to-day communication. The best you can do is keep Outlook, iMail, or Gmail closed except for dedicated times during the day. While you are at it, spend this time really reading what people are sending you instead of just skimming it, and take more time to write thoughtful messages when you have a need to respond to someone.
4. You will find yourself with huge amounts of time you don’t know what to do with. Previously you would get bored for a second and use that moment to check your email, or twitter, or whatever. You will need a replacement activity or you will relapse.

a.    I too am a smartphone user, and I highly recommend downloading the Amazon Kindle app, and putting together a reading list of books. Anytime you find yourself with a few spare minutes you would otherwise check the latest Reddit, read a few pages out of your current book.

b.    Take up meditation. I will leave this as optional, but I highly recommend it. There is no real wrong way to do it, the simplest is to sit somewhere comfortable, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing. For beginners, its recommended that you count on the inhale of every breathe from one to ten and restart at one any time you notice your mind drifting onto something else. Eventually you start to embrace any moment of silence because it gives you an opportunity to practice meditation however briefly and stay more in the moment.

c.     Spend time with people. Talk to them in person. Be they friends, family, coworkers, or strangers on the street. Real people are way more interesting than self satisfied strangers online.

d.    At work, if you find yourself with small periods of time where you don’t know what else to do and would otherwise check out the latest unprofitablestartup.io on Hacker News, take initiative and think for a second why you are in this state. Why do you not know what to do next? Are you blocked by someone else? Go find them and figure out what needs to be done to get them moving. Do you not have anything to work on? Check with your manager. Is your manager or not around or do you not have one? Work on that thing you talked about staying late and fixing a few weeks ago.

e.     For longer periods of time outside work, filling this time hole becomes more challenging. Much like you have a list of books you are reading, create a list of things you want to work on. This can be as small and simple as a household chore you have put off, or it may be learning a new language, writing a book, or writing a blog post about how much better your life is now that you rid yourselves of those evil time suck websites.

After your two weeks are up, take five minutes and reflect on how they have gone for you and your state of mind. Have you been more productive at work? Have you done things you don’t normally do? Have you finally gotten around to doing something you have been putting off for a long time? At this point you should make a decision whether or not to continue your self imposed exile from the online world or return to your procrastinating ways.

Here is my dirty little secret. I’m not perfect. For the last five months I’ve been alternating periods on and off the grid. I generally spend about three weeks off, than one to three weeks on. Mostly this is just because I am weak and there is always something that comes up that sucks me back in. Honestly I do find that during my period of time offline I am happier, I am more productive, and my life is generally improved. Eventually I hope to have the willpower to stay in my cold turkey state indefinitely, but like an arctangent approaching an asymptote I may forever more forward without ever fully reaching my goal. Better to try and fail than to not try at all.