I have found this a useful question to ask myself lately: are you executing, or just working? Just because I’m sitting in front of a laptop with Gmail or Textmate or Terminal open does not entail I’m doing meaningful work. This Gcal event is a reminder to GTD. ( for similar tricks / concepts I highly rec 4 hour work week.)
I love playing mind games with myself like setting Gcal reminders like this one or creating artificial constraints. Now, another hour of work before soccer.
Here are a few excepts from a recent nymag feature on distraction. I recommend reading the entire piece if you can make it through ;)
What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
* * *
The only time multitasking does work efficiently, Meyer says, is when multiple simple tasks operate on entirely separate channels—for example, folding laundry (a visual-manual task) while listening to a stock report (a verbal task). But real-world scenarios that fit those specifications are very rare.
For quite some time I have been subconciously tuning out when conversations begin with “I’m doing X” or “I’ve started this new routine.” I just recently figured this out.
When conversations begin in such declaritive fashion, they tend to be bullshit. Telling someone about your new strategy for diet or productivity is great for public accountability and goal setting, but I’ve never learned anything new from these types of conversations.
More productive conversatiosn usually ensue when visual results prompt a question. “Woah, looks like you’ve lost a lot of weight. What have you been doing?” Or, “I heard some people talking about / linking to your work. How’s that going?”
Results driven conversations are so much more fun.
[hypocritical update]: I’m doing this new thing where I’m going to do more and talk less about what I’m about to do ;). Call me on it next time I don’t lead with results, si vous ples.
I send lots of emails via Gmail, and I hate waiting for the full Gmail UI (chat list, inbox, etc) to load every time I want to send a quick note. Jenny and I riffed on this topic awhile back on Hackaddict, where we talked about a nice little bookmarklet for composing messages ( http://bit.ly/11Xgv ). This works pretty well, but still takes quite awhile to load.
This morning, I suddenly had the insight to hack around with any iGoogle Gadgets for composing Gmail gadgets to see if I could find anything faster. After a few minutes I struck gold and found this link loading in an iframe: http://bit.ly/gCompose
NOTE: if this link doesn’t work, see the UPDATE at the bottom of this post!
This loads in about 1s, doesn’t show chat or inbox, and still performs autocomplete on the recipient address fields. I am going to use this exclusively for authoring new emails now.
One of the the ways I know this is going to save tons of time is by not loading inbox or chat. When I just want to fire off a quick email, inbox and chat always end up diverting me into 5 minutes of distraction from whatever I was doing. GTD! This bookmarklet is the perfect workflow for getting things done and keeping focus.
*** UPDATE: *** if the above doesn’t work, you probably have a different link for your Google Account to this compose page that depends on a special “mid” flag in the URL.
To make this work, first install the Gmail gadget for iGoogle: http://bit.ly/qWO3
Open the Compose window from the gadget on iGoogle:
Right click on this window, and choose to open the frame in a new window so you can get the location:
The important part here is to get the correct “mid”:
Now, either bookmark this page, or, substitute your “mid” for “141” in this bookmarklet and add it to your bookmarks bar:
Or, you can do the same substitution in this ubiquity command:
CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "gmail",
preview: "Opening gmail compose window window",
description: "opens a laser fast gmail compose window",
author: {name: "kortina"},
execute: function() {
var document = Application.activeWindow.activeTab.document;
var f='http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax?hl=en&mid=141&view=comp';
a = function() {
if (!window.open(f, "gmail.bookmark.by.kortina", 'location=yes,links=no,scrollbars=no,toolbar=no,width=600,height=480'))
location.href=f;
};
a();
}
});
If anyone knows a way around this “mid” business, please post in the comments, but unfortunately this seems to be the only way to make the compose window load on different Gmail accounts. Sorry for the confustion, folks!
