I suffer from an in ability to successfully monitor multiple sources of information. For example, I rarely check on lists that I have procmailed out to their own folder. If its a list I need to stay on top of, I have to dump it to my primary inbox. For one list, I even dump messages to my inbox *and* keep a copy in a subfolder. That way I can keep on top of what's going on, but also keep a low-barrier-to-delete since I know I have an archival copy. I do think its important for me to check e-mail regularly, but there is some part of my brain that considers e-mail to be a time sink, and prevents me from going beyond what it considers the bare-minimum: Inbox messages.
Another instance of this disorder struck me with RSS. There are web pages that I check every day, and not all of them have RSS feeds. I played with a few different RSS readers a while back, and decided that straw was my favorite. But I could not get myself in the habit of bringing up a second application. Later I started using Firefox, and I thought I'd have better luck with something like Sage. But even that was easy to avoid because it requires actually opening up the sage panel. I would either never check it or, in times of boredom, check it too often. Since then I've given up on RSS readers. These days I've stolen an idea from Alex Chiang and just keep a bookmark folder called "daily" and one called "monthly". Every morning I hit the "Open All in Tabs" item in the daily folder, and quickly ctrl-w through pages w/ no new content. My daily folder includes things like bug reports I'm monitoring for activity, gitweb views of files where I'm waiting for a fix, blogs, parcel tracking, comics, wiki watch lists, etc. Since a few of these pages are rather important, I always remember to do it and therefore force myself to browse the others as well. Most days I spend less than 10 minutes "wasting time" going through them.
Its strange to both be aware of poor working habits, yet know from years of experience that I'll be more successful if I work around them rather than trying to retrain myself.
posted at: 16:33 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry