At the excellent advice of someone whose excellent advice has never failed me yet, I’m taking a one week vacation from Facebook and Twitter and a couple of other social media sites. This isn’t self-righteousness, I make no apology for loving Facebook and what it affords – but my friend said his recent self-imposed exile was “like having an extra week’s holiday.” Who could resist that?
If you’re interested in how, I installed Stayfocusd on my Macbook, and temporarily deleted the Facebook and Twitter from my phone. It will be interesting to see how many ways there are to get round that. I’m already an almost daily user of Freedom for when I’m writing, and after only half an hour, I think I’m going to love Stayfocusd.
I have been meaning to have a go at http://pomodorotechnique.com/ but only managed to apply it sporadically. What do you think of it, Jonathan?
I’ve tried SO many of those things, especially (more recently) Time Out, which rings a bell when it’s time for you to focus again. I’ve not stuck with any of them. I found that if I got into a period of intense concentration, the timer broke the spell. If I couldn’t, then I’d just end up waiting for the 50 minutes or whatever to be up. It sometimes proved useful if I needed to do something boring and not very taxing like fold laundry or tidy a drawer, but for anything requiring you to get into a zone, 25, 50 minutes just isn’t enough, and you become too conscious of it. Not a huge fan.
These breaks remind me of using ergocise a while back. I ended up ignoring them pretty quickly.
Ergocise: thanks for the word, new to me! I can imagine I would ignore those prompts too.