Cutting down on distractions, and the cliche of the day

03/01/2007

In my Refactoring Your Wetware talks, I make a point about cutting down on distractions. Us humans are really bad at multitasking across different levels of abstraction, and so distractions can really throw your day off track.

If you’re deep in thought and get interrupted, it can task an average of twenty minutes to reload your context and get back into the task. So I talk a lot about reducing interruptions and distractions.

One thing I just noticed: the number of stray emails for things that I had signed up for was huge. Mailing list confirmations, news blurbs from magazines and websites and so on really added up.

So I took a few minutes to add filter rules in my mail client to make sure that each of these would get tossed into a “newsletter” folder on my IMAP server. That, combined with a top-notch spam filter helps ensure that the only email that gets through is genuinely important.

It’s a small thing, but small things matter: no snowflake ever feels responsible for the avalanche, but taken together, they’ll bring down the mountain.

And that’s your cliche of the day :-)