Funding Progress, and Information Diets
We're up to 30 dollars in donations. 20 more days to make 70 more dollars to release the story.
In other news, you might notice me getting a bit quieter lately. I am trying to institute an information diet. How I am going to do this when I make my living in front of a computer, I am not exactly certain.
I know that I am essentially addicted to checking Email and instant messages. I have sometimes wasted hours surfing on the computer, casually IMing with friends. Sometimes, it's fun to socialize, but I think I do this too often. I'm trying to learn to break the addiction.
Step one is to go through my RSS feeds and cut them in half, at the very least. I'm going to identify the best sources of information in the various areas that I follow and get rid of the rest. I'd like to get my feed reading down to less than 20 minutes a day, and eventually, only an hour a week. I don't need to be on the cutting edge of the world anymore. Being one week behind isn't going to hurt my writing.
Step two is controlling the email checking impulse. The old me would roll over in bed, pick up the laptop, and check email before even getting up to use the bathroom. My new rule is, I can only check my email when I get into work and have already made my list of what I plan to accomplish for the day. Then, I will check my email at 11:30 and 3:30, and that's it. No email in the evenings. I will allow myself not more than 1 hour of instant messaging an evening to start, and will hopefully scale back to one hour a week. I'm worried that by doing some of these things, I will be hurting some friendships that I maintain online, but I am going to stay friends with everyone I am already friends with, and I'm going to just try and make the time I do spend talking with them more valuable.
I'm not very optimistic about step two right now. It's practically an instinct to pull up the email window while I'm working to see what's come in.
Collectively, these two tasks alone should free up nearly 30% of my productivity, I estimate. Yes, I am that information addicted. It's time to focus on results and not consuming information. Time to learn rather than consume.
Step three is to continue to blog, but to try to make fewer posts, but make the posts that I do make much more concise and in-depth. My aim is to write articles, not blogs. I'll still do the personal stuff over at livejournal, because everyone needs that kind of outlet and that's mine. But my main blog, I am redesigning, and refocusing. I might only post once a day, or once a week. However long it takes me between writing really good posts. Reading Copyblogger has made me ashamed of some of the content I have posted in the past.
I'll update occasionally on this experiment here.
On another topic: I should be working from home two days a week in the near future. But I am still seeking a better employment opportunity that utilizes my talents as a web-oriented designer. More and more, I feel cut out of the web work here, and I find that increasingly frustrating. I finished the flash demo and a portal site over the last week, though.
-JT