Improving productivity on your Mac

I’m an Internet junkie. I admit it. I honestly should be attending Internet anonymous meetings.

One of my biggest problems is how to get away from checking my email, rss feeds and other distracting internet sites, long enough to be able to get work done. This post has some very helpful suggestions for those of us working on a Mac but some of its advices  could be easily applied to Windows machines as well. I particularly like these points:

“Put an away message up on iChat and stick to it. Better yet: turn off iChat all together. No point in being online if you can’t talk anyway, right? Lower the refresh rates on Mail, your RSS reader and Twitterrific from, say, one to five minutes to a less eventful thirty minutes. If you think your task is going to take a bit longer than the norm, then lower the refresh rates closer to an hour. If everything stops beeping and bouncing in your dock and desktop, I’m sure you’ll be less tempted to break away from your work and be sucked back into your social life.

(…)

The portability of a laptop allows you to take it almost anywhere and some places you go may be distracting, such as Starbucks, the park or even your own living room. Even if you have a laptop computer, it is still useful to have an area set aside as your workspace in which you can focus and begin to work on what you need. After all, if you aren’t in a calm and comfortable place, how will those creative juices begin flowing? 

(…)

After a long period of time, you may grow irritable and unmotivated to continue your work. So, give yourself a break. All work and no play is never the answer. Even the biggest corporate geniuses take a lunch hour. If you give yourself a break each time your pump out a few paragraphs to your research paper or each time you complete a chapter of the family vacation DVD you’re creating, you will begin to feel motivated to do it again so that you can get the same reward.”

All these advices are very good. I do need a workspace to be able to feel motivated to work and that’s what my carrel has become. I also need breaks and I have no trouble in taking them, particularly for lunch. I never thought of lowering the refresh rates on my email though, and that certainly would help with the Internet addiction!!

Update

[this was originally posted at my main blog]

We got our iMac and my iPod yesterday. More on that later… all I can say is… Holy cow, the screen is HUGE! I guess 24 inches was a bit of an overkill, but hey, we do lots of graphic work…

On another note, I’ve discovered I really can’t do much academic work at home. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the messiness of all the moving boxes that distract me, all I know is that I’ve been procrastinating writing a report about my research for the past two weeks. I finally decided to go out to the local coffee shop and write there. In one hour I had written two reports and a newsletter blurb! This morning I came to the library and in a  couple of hours I typed my reports, edited them, sent emails to my committee, fellow conference-organizer JP, the administrator of CRRS about a possible fellowship, and my department about a misplaced tax form… Suddenly, after a month and a half in limbo, I feel productive again!!

Hope the feeling lasts because I just received notice that my abstract was accepted for an international conference in Chicago next April. It will be my first big conference and I’m not even sure my paper is do-able… Hope so…