Focusing on what matters
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:headline: How to avoid the information overload?
:date: 2016-03-17
:tags: focus, time-management
:category: thoughts

I do have a problem with information.

You know. I **have** to check my emails, irc, twitter, my feed reader etc.
I need to.

And this thing makes me feel uncomfortable at the end of the day, because I
feel that I missed something. That I missed some good time, away from news and
agitation.

Working remotely is sometimes hard. Hard because you need to at the same time
be in the discussions channels and work on the interesting projects. A real
myth.

In practice, I'm really bad at multi-tasking. I tried a few times the *Pomodoro*
technique, which forces me to focus on a task for 25mn, but this split of my day
into slices of 25mn breaks my natural flow.

So, what do I need? I tried to change my tools, it helped a bit. Still, I'm not
focused like I would like to be.

Maybe that's just me who needs some more persuasion over myself, but the best
way I found to work is to unplug the cable. Literally. At work, at some point I
was using a RJ45 cable to connect to the Internet. When I wanted to work on
something, I could just unplug this cable.

And that's amazing how you find yourself in the process to "check"
something on the web. Mails, irc… well, you got the idea. You're litterally,
without even noticing, switching to your browser an opening a new tab…

Of course, that Web isn't filled only with lolcats and twitter messages
(even if I would **love** to see a pie chart with the repartition of lolcats
VS the rest of the web's content), so sometimes you need some precious bit of
information that's there. Fair enough. plug the cable, do what you **need** to
do, and unplug. Alexis, unplug!

It also helps to have some fair bit of documentation available directly on my
machine (I used to have the python docs, I should get it back!)

I'm feeling adventurous, so I'll try something new starting tomorrow, and I'll
report back in here my findings. Here's the challenge:

* **Check emails only once a day**. Do **not** do it in the morning, before
  working, to keep my mind clear. I would say at 2pm (after lunch).
  (This doesn't mean I will not send mails tho)
* Stay away from the Internet during the morning. I'll not connect if I don't
  need to.

Let's see how it goes :)
