If you are like me, you struggle with finding time to be productive. My computer used to be a veritable fire hose of inputs. Email chimes every 5 minutes; new RSS feed updates every time I open Safari; one of my contacts coming online or wanting to chat with me in Skype. I found it almost impossible to concentrate on any single task for more than 5 minutes, so I reclaimed my productivity by turning off automatic updates or closing these apps altogether. Now, my computer is silent until I tell it to sync with the outside world?¢‚Ǩ¬¶on my terms.

Tip 1: Turn off Automatic Email Retrieval
This is a big one. I often find that I have to send a quick email, but doing so means opening my mail application, which, in turn, means that I have to respond to any number of new emails that flood in. By turning off the automatic retrieval feature, I’m able to send email and get back to what I was doing. Then I can go in later when I’m ready and click the “Get Mail” button and see what’s been happening.

Tip 2: Hide Feed Counts in Safari and Move Your Feeds to a Dedicated Reader
One of Safari’s greatest features is its ability to tell you right there in your bookmarks bar how many new articles have been published to your various RSS subscriptions since you last checked in. I have about two dozen of these, so I found that opening Safari became a pavlovian exercise in checking the new feeds before remembering that I was opening Safari for a reason?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùto check on something actually work-related. At some point, I’m sure Firefox and IE will catch onto this great feature and start doing the same thing. As much as it pained me, I simply had to turn this feature off. In Safari, go Preferences > RSS and uncheck “Automatically update bookmarks in bookmarks bar.” You don’t have to get rid of this feature completely, however. By keeping “Automatically update bookmarks in the bookmarks menu” checked, you can get your RSS feed update counts simply by clicking the bookmark menu button.

Alternatively, you can move your RSS feed subscriptions to an external app that does pretty much the same thing as Safari. The best one I’ve found on the Mac is called NetNewsWire (by News Gator). They have a Windows reader that appears to be similar to NetNewsWire called FeedDaemon, but I have never used it. There are plenty, though, and the concept is the same: you open those apps on your terms, and read your RSS feeds when you want to, not when you’re trying to get something done.

Tip 3: Turn off Your Chat Client
I liken chat clients to working in a cubicle farm: it’s noisy and your are constantly getting interrupted. I, for one, find that open-door policies and open-air work environments are an anathema to productivity. So I turn off my chat clients and open them only when I need to make a call on Skype or ping someone at a pre-determined time. Yes, this is antithetical to the purpose of chatting, but chatting is antithetical to getting things done, so it stays off.

Give it a try. It takes an adjustment since are changing what are, in effect, addictive behaviors, but once you get used to the change, you’ll come to find that by keeping your apps quiet and the number of inputs you have to a minimum, you’ll be able to carve out longer periods of productivity throughout your day.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 5:41 am and is filed under Recommendations, Reviews . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.