Ben Roy

It was kind of a strange weekend (long weekend, really) for me. I was out in DC for Yanik Silver's Underground conference. Most of that is a topic for another day, but one of the things I got to thinking about while I was there was the inefficiency with which a lot of my time is spent.

I'm not afraid of putting in hard work to get stuff done, but I realized that I spend a fair amount of my time sitting at my computer running at far less than optimal speed. Life is way too short to waste time, so I came home ready to shake things up and try to improve my processes.

I haven't gotten it all figured out yet, but one of the first things I know I need to do is spend less time 'checking' things. I'm not ready to shift to once a day email (which is to say, I'm not yet bought into this being a good idea), but I am going to limit a number of other activities.

PayPal for instance: once a day at most. Obviously I'll make an exception if I'm doing the books or need to look something up, but other than that I'm just going to let it take care of itself.

It's not the 19 seconds that it takes me to navigate there and auto-login. It's the mental shift of breaking away from whatever I am/should be working on. Add in a few of those every hour, half hour, whatever, and suddenly it's impossible to gain any traction on real work.

I don't know what all those things are, but now that I'm looking out for them I intend to relegate them to a once a day schedule, or even less frequently if possible. In the meantime, I'm going to try not to replace that with looking at my email even more frequently.