Glen over at the self improvement blog LifeDev has an interesting way of dealing with distraction and remaining productive. He works through projects in parallel, so that when he's distracted it's by another project. Recently he found out that his father had been working the same way for years, by balancing projects to keep himself interested:

Dad has a simple method for keeping himself busy and entertained with what he's working on. He simply starts 3 projects at the same time. He can work on whichever he pleases throughout the day, and go back and forth as his mood permits. If he becomes bored with a task or needs to think about how to do something, he switches tasks. By the end of the day he'll have completed, (or nearly completed), 3 different projects. This is much better than only making halfway through a single project and getting distracted.

Both he and his father recognise that they are more prone to distraction than some people, so rather than fight it they set up their work so that when they do get distracted it's by another relevant project and not a time sink. Photo by Flik.

Reinhard Engels over at the self improvement blog Everyday Systems found that his weekends were astoundingly unproductive. Despite having a job that had him stuck in front of a desk every day all week, he would gravitate towards his computer on the weekends and wile away the hours.

I don't watch much TV. I don't play video games. But I fritter away endless hours in front of the computer. I tried a bunch of restrictions on home computer use. It was much harder to stick with them than I'd thought. Here's what did stick: thou shalt not touch the computer on weekends between breakfast and dinner.

If had has any ideas that related to the computer like designs for his website, emails he needs to send, etc. he simply writes them down on a piece of paper and sets it aside until he's devoted his daily block of time to analogue pursuits. While it sounds like pure heresy to a die hard nerdling like myself, on the days when I devote my computer to resource hogging tasks and leave it to do its thing I'm amazed at how much I get done without the digital distractions. For more distraction management ideas, check out Reduce Screen Time with 52 Nights Unplugged and Unplug to Avoid Online Distractions. Photo by deanj.

We've all got them—those bookmarks that sit on your toolbar (or on a keyboard shortcut, if , begging you to take just, you know five minutes and see if anything's new over there. Web developer and author Paul Bausch certainly has a few, so he's taken to editing them to add a small bit of JavaScript around their URLs, which brings up a prompt asking "Are you sure?" The format is easy to adjust and edit, though, if your procrasti-browsing habits require a more strern warning. Here's the basic template:

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Yet another reason to shut down your email client (or close your Gmail tab) and process messages in batches: a study shows that it takes an average of 64 seconds to recover your train of thought after interruption by email. That's more than a minute per email, and could easily add up to hours over a given workweek for those of you with particularly active inboxes. [SMH via CNet]

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The brilliant (yet easily distracted) Merlin Mann says he has a bad habit of Cmd+clicking sets of web browser tabs full of shiny things out to wrest his attention from the important work of doing stuff. To avoid getting sucked down the rabbit hole with one mindless click, he's purposefully inserting a page that asks him outright, "Is this really what you want to be doing right now?" He calls this little self-mind trick an "undistraction." Love the idea (even though the irony that his page asks an eerily similar question as my biggest online distraction is hard to miss). If you're not a Cmd+clicker, you can also use fuller-strength apps like LeechBlock to save yourself from online time-suckers. What games do you play with yourself to focus on the important stuff? Let us know in the comments.

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If you've spent any time stumbling around the net, you've run across a site using an irritating animated favicon—a moving icon that shows up in the address bar, the site's tab, and even the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. (Here's one at the DHL site.) While there's no way by default to disable animated icons in Firefox other than completely disabling all favicons, there are a couple of possible ways to block a particularly distracting web page icon.

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Here at Lifehacker improving your productivity is one of our big goals, but we're not such getting-things-done zealots that we don't recognise the value in occasionally aiming to do nothing whatsoever. In a recent piece for The Guardian, Tom Hodgkinson makes a good argument for why being unproductive can have benefits:

Faffing is completely harmless, whereas its opposite - dynamic, purposeful activity - is often very harmful. Faffers do not tend to kill people or make them work 12-hour days or sell them shoddy merchandise or lend them vast sums of money that they cannot pay back.

The joys of simply faffing around [The Guardian]

Mac OS X only: When it's time to dig deep and do some serious focusing on a task—and refrain from surfing or checking email entirely for a block of time—you want temporary internet disconnection utility Freedom. Freedom serves a simple purpose: It disables all wireless and Ethernet networking on your Mac for up to six hours at a time. After the time you specify is up, Freedom re-enables your network adapters and display a confirmation. What, think you can just turn Freedom off to hop online to check the Olympic medal count? Not so fast, buster.

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Thoughtful blogger Merlin Mann publishes a three-part series of posts on the constant battle creative people face between making things and making themselves available to others. Mann writes:

If the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you'd originally thought you were. [...] Do you generate more IMs than comic panels? Have you drafted more web comments than scenes in your screenplay? Or, for that matter, do you find you're taking more meetings than photos these days?

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Google Documents has added a fullscreen editing mode to the "View" menu on individual documents, a convenience previously available only through a Greasemonkey script. Combined with Firefox 3's serious fullscreen capabilities and GDocs' fixed-width page view, it lets you turn the online office suite into a no-distraction writing environment—provided you can resist popping open another tab with Ctrl+T. It's worth noting that Zoho Writer has a similar "Maximize editor" function, but it's not as severe as Google Docs' nothing-but-white implementation.

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