As many of you know, the Pink of Perfection May Challenge sounds a lot like my France Telecom March Challenge . . . except the latter was involuntary and resulted in a 6 week media and telecommunication blackout. While it did give me a chance to catch up on my reading, the France Telecom challenge is not something I’m eager to repeat. A little too isolating for me.
So I’ve crafted a new challenge a little more suited to my time wasting habits. I’m calling it:
One Window, One Visit, One Week.
I’m home all day while Anne’s at work and that leaves me with a lot of time to kill. This challenge is about changing what I do with it.
Most days, the first thing I do when I wake up is open Anne’s laptop (since mine is now deceased). Within a few minutes, I have a cup of coffee next to me, CNN or BBC on the television and anywhere from 3 to 8 browser windows open. Add in tabs (ooh, tabs) and itunes and I’m a multitasking mess. After a couple of hours, my morning is gone but I have little to show for it.
I’ve checked my email a hundred times today, but there are emails in my inbox dating back to January that I still haven’t responded to. Despite the noise (and the carbon emitting power consumption) from CNN, I still don’t know what’s going on in the world. I’ve gone to all sorts of sites today, but, other than a few exceptions, I haven’t really read any of them. I’m not web surfing- I’m web drifting.
My goal for the week is to spend less time in front of the computer and to get more done.
The Rules:
1. I will not multitask - If I’m online, I will have one window open with one tab. If I’m watching CNN or BBC on the TV, then I can only watch TV. If I’m checking my email, I will turn off gchat.
2. I will not visit a website more than once a day- Instead of checking my email a dozen times, I’ll check it once and respond to any emails I want to deal with right then. I will force myself to accept that nothing in my email is really that urgent.
3. I will plan my time in advance- I will decide what I am going to do online before I open the laptop. If I can’t think of anything, I should probably be doing something else.
4. I can only visit the following list of websites:
Blogging: Forever 22
Email: Gmail
Fantasy Baseball: My Sporting News league (Go Toulonians!)
Job Searching sites: I’ll be generous here since it’s important but I’ll try not to abuse it- craigslist, indeed.com, idealist.org
On a limited basis, I’m also allowed to pay bills and book travel, but I am only allowed to visit those sites if I’m actually booking a trip or actually paying a bill.
That’s it. No other blogs. No wikipedia. No facebook.
The point is that I should fill my new found time by focussing on the things I am already doing and not by finding more things to do online.
The challenge starts as soon as I post this entry.
And with that, I’m off. . . Wish me luck.
May 20, 2008 at 6:46 am |
What about reading my website, and all of my articles?
May 20, 2008 at 7:27 am |
I think the one tab thing is a really good idea, one that I’ve been trying, too. Sometimes all those tabs just make me feel rushed and harried for no reason. Good luck!
May 20, 2008 at 12:36 pm |
Apologies to both Sarah and Jereme because I will not be reading your blogs this week. But that just means I’ll have lots of good archives to read on monday and maybe I’ll be a little bit more focussed on what I’m reading.
And if there’s something really exciting in the mean time, please cut and paste it into an email and send it my way. Because I still get Gmail once a day.
May 21, 2008 at 2:04 pm |
You might want to check out http://rescuetime.com/ – it might be helpful once you start allowing yourself a little more freedom online. I had read this post about it (http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2008/05/07/rescuetime-free-time-management-software/) and thought it was pretty cool.
May 23, 2008 at 4:53 am |
Thanks for the link. I’ll definitely check it out. . .next week.
In the meantime, anyone want to check it out for me? Nothing like surfing the web vicariously.