Having spent the past few weeks playing Whac-a-mole on a project, and waking this day with some leftover sanity and a lot of work done, I think I’ve arrived at a framework.
Elements of a productive work day
- Turning off clients for IM, IRC, and e-mail. The benefits of working without distractions have been well-publicized. I’ve long detested trying to work with IM and IRC anyway; this time I decided to enjoy hours of even deeper productivity by turning off e-mail as well except for an hour at 9am, 12pm, and 5:30pm. Regrettably, many customers/project leads haven’t modernized to this way of working, so expect indignation when you try this.
- Queueing up the right tunes in Last.fm. I prefer instrumental music when I work, since I won’t drift away into parsing lyrics. Normally, I’m indifferent to classical music, but I like working to it, since it reminds me of being in a classy bookstore, instead of being huddled at a desk sweating over support for :hover in IE7. Strangely, both middlebrow “light” classical and less favored experimental works (try typing in “Delibes” and “Xenakis” into Last.fm‘s artist search) seemed acceptable background music.
- Configuring LeechBlock. I’ve got Firefox hot-rodded with loads of add-ons, and one of the newest to me, and most valuable, is LeechBlock.
Get back to work
It works by blocking your browsing to certain sites after a given time period. I set mine to a reasonable 25 minutes spent on my favorite time-wasting Web properties. It’ll probably become a boast or social marker to confess which sites you find so compelling you require LeechBlock to take them away from you. For the record, mine are Netvibes, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and the New York Times.
- Water. Seems so obvious, but a lot of people forget to drink water. Granted, I’m lucky to have good tap water piped straight from the California mountains, so it’s not hard to choke down. It also helps to have a glass you like. Mine is an imperial pint that I refill four times, and which gets re-purposed for a good IPA at the end of the workday.
Think I skipped over something? Add your suggestions in the comments.