Going Dark
October 17th, 2007
Not sure if it’s just me, but lately the constant barrage of IM/IRC/Twitter/Email has been making me feel less productive than I know I can be so for the majority of the day I have been Going Dark. That is, turn comms off and the music up.
I don’t go completely off net as I need my other brain to remind me of things I constantly forget.
I miss my IRC buddies from #roro on freenode.net heaps, they are a constant source of knowledge and entertainment but they are pretty good at posting to the roro tumblr, so that keeps me in the loop mostly.
I actually jump on IM and IRC once or twice during the day, mostly at lunch, or in a lull between pushing out code.
I’d like to hear how everyone else deals with the “always on” side of things?
1 Response to “Going Dark”
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.
October 20th, 2007 at 11:58 PM There are a couple of ways to deal with always being "on". Set spurt periods where you are dark, when you do not even check IM or IRC etc - this includes turning off all audio and visual cues that there is activity going on. This sucks on the reverse side of an IM - I hate being ignored. Option 2 that I'm trialling at the moment is: Signal vs. Noise. When you are in crunch mode, turn it all off. When in normal mode, turn off ALL indirect notifiers. Put IM to Busy (because you are busy, and people will hopefully think twice before pinging you) and for IRC only turn on the alerts for when you are addresssed directly. In the downtime between spurts, feel free to go back and review IRC history. Spurts need not be '5min every hour' but when you feel like you need a break. Though - I do recall reading somewhere there is a pretty big lead time on getting into the zone and being 'productive'