Communicating DND, in a nice way.

A while ago I listened to Professor Daniel J Levitin give an LSE lecture, The Organised Mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload, which I’ve recommended to a number of people since. I’ll take this chance now to generally recommend a sub. to the LSE public lecture series to anyone reading this. Among many of the topics Levitin brought up, I’d like to write briefly about focus.

Here’s what I do…

I’ve adopted a number of productivity measures: checking emails, pomodoro techniques, kanban, and various others- even public academic writing accountability. Some have stuck, some haven’t, some are adopted ad-hoc.

Here’s what I am going to do…

I came away from the lecture knowing I needed to implement a daily “chunk” of time that exceeds anything else I do- something truly indulgent. I’ve opted for a three hour (minimum) chunk where anything that creates a notification is turned off. I’ve been trying to do it for a while, but I always break the chunk so I need to improve and I believe writing this post equals something I can hold myself to. My current full time concern is finishing my post-grad. thesis (like yesterday) whilst having other pursuits (that keep me sane) so I want a way to communicate when I begin a chunk as it won’t start at the same time each day¹. I think the best place for this is Twitter:-

td;dr: If you find yourself here it might be that you’d like to speak to me. However I’m ignoring everything (for some hours) while I focus. I will get back to you though.

  • My chunk/focus/DND tweets will look something like-  “[something I am doing] chunk: http://marksabino.com/2015/11/03/chunks”.

¹ My brother told me you could only get through on the phone to Kraftwerk’s studio when they turned the ringer on at a set time each day, when we talked about how to set life to do not disturb.

 

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