To Do: Less

I blame it on a particular college professor I had, that ever since I have shared his obsession with über-high levels of productivity. The formula/mantra goes like this:

Your Time = Your Life

-- therefore --

Wasting Your Time = Wasting Your Life

I don't disagree with this; and I still have nothing but the highest respect and fondest affection for my professor and friend. But, some lessons from Ancient Philosophy take longer to set in than others.

For a time, not wasting my time meant always having something to do and making sure that something was productive. So I armed myself with the latest gadgets and other tools to keep productivity and learning close-at-hand. Then I found better ways to organize these things so that they were even more efficient. I cut out the seconds it took to access an item and kept that thing close at hand so I could get to it instantly and waste no small iota of my time/life.

But something happened along the way. Now that I had all these things closer at hand, they were easier to access; so I would. I would access them very quickly. In between answering emails, my efficient system allows me to pop over to Google Reader and see what new articles are posted on my favorite news sites or friends' blogs. Reading an article from there, it prompts me to make a quick lookup on Wikipedia. And before I know it, the half-second it takes for the software to send an email which I was trying to fill productively has degenerated into an hour and a half of research into posthumously awarded Oscars or the latest developments in invisibility cloaks. This would not do.

My goal is increased productivity by decreased time wasting. For me, this meant eliminating some of the "productivity tools" which seduce my attention during those nanoseconds I had to kill. The result has been drastically increased productivity by means of self-imposed sensory underload.

Here's how I'm doing it: I'm starting with the goal of using my time intentionally. So this means eliminating multiple choice from my computing experience. I know where I want to go and don't need my computer reminding me of the other places I could go. 

The links in my bookmarks bar and the programs in my Dock (I use a Mac), like Google Earth, cry out to me to come while away hours in their soft embrace.

No more! I removed the Bookmarks Toolbar from my web browser and set my home page to a blank page. Then I removed all icons from my dock (can't remove Finder or Trash; I wish!). A Mac user who follows me might ask 

how I open documents, programs and websites. My answer: the old fashioned way. I use something of a command line interface. I actually type the address (or start it since Safari will autocomplete it) to the website I want to visit. This forces me to double-consider if that's where I should be going now, not be distracted by other places I could go, and keeps me from instinctively opening up the time-wasting can-of-worms that is Google Reader—unless I really want to spend my time reading news.

For programs and documents, I use Spotlight. This is brilliant! Spotlight is a faster application launcher than almost anything! With a "Command + Space" keypress, I get the prompt. It takes only the typing of a few letters for Spotlight to highlight exactly what I'm looking for. I open it and am off to the productivity races. This also results in instant access to what I need without the distractions of multiple choice along the way.¹

Observers of my screenshot examples in this post will notice that I've also set my desktop background to black and the OS X theme to a monochromatic one. What's more, I am writing this post in complete black-and-white. I find these choices help with productivity, but also aide in creativity—a subject for an entirely separate post soon to come.

¹ For my friends suffering on Windows computer who might want a similar experience, Google provides Desktop Search which will deliver almost the same experience as Spotlight.