We live in an age of distraction. If you watch TV, you’re interrupted every 8-10 minutes by three minutes of commercials. Radio stations will play five or six song sets before they too are forced to allow various companies to interject.   If you’re trying to work, there’s always the constant influx of emails, phone calls or text messages. Particularly in a society where multi-tasking is see as the pinnacle of efficiency, I feel pretty justified in saying that life has trained me to have a short attention span. Unfortunately this kind of attention span can be a problem if you want to get anything done. Writing and reading comprise the bulk of my work, but just like the XKCD comic, I apparently can’t sustain more than a few minutes of typing without heading over to Firefox or my RSS reader. While reading, my mind wants to think about anything except the text in front of me. How do I work around this?

Following the notion of half an hour of cardio a day is good for your heart, I’ve decided to focus in half hour increments. The units are small enough that I’m not overly taxing my attention span, but long enough that I can work up some solid productivity. The way it works is that I’ve installed a timer on my computer. When I’m ready to settle down and be productive, I start the timer going. While the timer is running, I’m not allowed to concentrate on anything other than what I’m working on. If there’s a fact I need to look up, I write TK in the document so I can search it after the time’s up. (Of course, that’s a different story when researching…) After half an hour is up, I move about for a bit, tidy up, maybe have a quick snack, something to use up some energy, and then it’s back for another half hour’s worth of work. Divvying the time up into smaller increments makes tasks less daunting than they might be otherwise, and you’d be surprised at just how much you can do in half an hour.

Photo Credit: XKCD