25 November 2009

Focus. Slam!



Something weird happened at work today.

I've been a little worried about my inability to stay focused. The problem is that I have the whole internet just sitting right in front of me, taunting me.

I'll be going along, and then: Oh, I gotta email L. And then after a couple of minutes, T sends me a link to a Scooby Doo redo, and I follow the link. And one distraction always leads to another. It's terrible.

So one of these many distractions was an RSS feed that said Google was doing a conference on Chrome OS. I couldn't resist (you know me). So I put it up on my right monitor, and kept working on my spec on the left. Turns out that I didn't need to watch it, mostly just listen. So I'm listening, and working away. And before I knew it, two hours had gone by, and I hadn't left my InDesign screen once. Two hours of me staying on task. It was incredible.

The video conference was enough to keep my mind from wandering to other things. But it was undemanding enough that I was able to keep designing away. Hmm.

(Of course, this wouldn't work if I were writing--too much mental conflict. But designing is a different story.)

2 comments:

  1. You, my friend, are a better man than I.

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  2. Dang! I had like the exact same experience after you shot me the link to that Dev conference. Maybe there's just something hypnotic about that Indian (like from India) head-of-Chrome-OS guy's voice that puts you in a working trance!

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