Whether you get your email from usual POP/IMAP servers, or have a webmail (e.g. GMail), you can always find countless small pieces of software that will notify you the very second you get a new email, with various gizmos blinking or beeping on your computer.
Reading email takes time; answering email takes even more time. Of course, you’re always free to just look at the notifications and postpone the actual reading; you’re also free to read your email as it flows into your inbox and answer them all at once, later in the day. But come on, let’s face it:
- When you’re concentrated on your current work and there’s a blinking gizmo telling you that you have 30 new messages (which your brain interprets as “Hey, stop! Danger! New stuff arriving!”), can you just ignore it, not go check your email (at least the subject lines), and keep working, undisturbed? Well, I couldn’t.
- You’re reading your new email and you find out that you’re going to want/need to write an anwser. Can you just go back to what you were doing and stop thinking about it until your chosen “email answering” time comes? Well, I couldn’t. I’d just start thinking about what I’m going to answer (and this can be a lot of thinking if there are numerous emails I want to answer), even if I’m trying to concentrate on something else.
I’m sure lots and lots of “optimize your time” books talk about this already, but since I haven’t read them, pardon me if I’m saying blindingly obvious things.
I don’t think the brain’s conscious concentration capabilities are very multitask. It needs a few minutes, while switching from one task to another, to get running at “full speed” again, especially if the two tasks are very different from each other. If you’re concentrating very well on task A and, for some reason, need to switch to task B for half an hour, and then come back to A, your brain needs time to adapt, both ways. On the other hand, if you make sure that nothing else will disturb you for a potentially unlimited amount of time in order to concentrate on a given task until it’s finished, you’re likely to be very, very efficient (at least this is true for me). By “nothing else”, I mean really nothing: no phone, no email, no co-worker entering your office to ask you something, no family member entering your room asking you where the hell you put her small statue of the purple bald bear washing its toes with sour cream, etc.
If you’ve set an automatic email notification every half an hour (which is already quite optimistic, I reckon?), and you actually go and check and/or answer your new emails each time, you’re spending extra time (maybe like one minute and a half, twice) to let your mind concentrate on the new task (reading email), and then concentrate again on what you were doing. So, if this is 6 minutes every hour, and if you’re spending 10 hours at work everyday (rough approximation :-p), you’ve wasted an hour just for switching between things, and that’s only for one day.
Okay, maybe those numbers aren’t accurate, and I don’t mean to be so anal about wasting a little time (hey, who’s that prick who doesn’t even allow his co-workers to enter his office to have a little chat?). But still, I think it is a good idea to prevent yourself from checking and answering your email more than, say, three times per day. If you run into anxious people who expect you to answer their email within half an hour and can’t wait until your next batch of answers, just tell them to give you a call! It’s really nice to be able to be so open and available for communication, but real concentration is not essentially a collective state of mind, and I find that when I can manage to set up a three or four-hour “Do NOT disturb” zone in my schedule sometimes, my productivity increases *a lot*.
How are you guys managing this?
PS : sorry for people who tried to access my website (or the whylinuxisbetter.net site) yesterday, my server had a few minor problems just after my post, bad luck. It’s all fixed now.
Do you know a way to stream (or progressive-download) XviD videos (or similar formats) without requiring visitors to download some rare plugin first, and so that people can view those videos on any OS? I also thought of QuickTime, but that’s even worse (no Linux version AFAIK). Can Fluendo do something like that? I can always wait for a Linux version of Flash 9 but, well… Oh, needless to say, Open source solutions are best!
