CROWDCTRL

I saw a rad graphic the other day in a post by Kathy Sierra, who is by far the #1 reason to go to SXSW this (and last) year. In reference to Twitter, she illustrated how so many distractions cut your productivity to zero and prevent you from achieving some good flow.

In her words, as time between interruptions asymptotically approaches zero, “we’re screwed”.

What’s more, those distractions are almost always self-inflicted.

I often find myself looking for distractions. I’m bored with whatever thing I’m supposed to do, or not wanting to be productive, or whatever. I start checking feeds, buddy lists, powder forecasts. All things that prevent the flow.

Kathy explains what that flow is:

Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our knowledge and skills, and that’s quite different from mindless tasks we can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely we are to ever get there.

So with that in mind, I recently did one thing to help cut down all the distraction and get me up to flow much easier. I set my dock to auto-hide. Hit your apple logo in the top left, and turn hiding on under your Dock settings.

This way, your feed reader, browser, IM window, and anything else that wants to bounce around doesn’t get your attention as easily. You have easy access to it, but can much easily ignore those little guilty distractions that can ground your productivity and kill flow. For me, it’s doubled my productivity and helped me get to flow much faster.