Separate Yourself
Mar 15A hint for those who are working and find themselves easily distracted. Well I guess a hint for all of us. It’s hard to focus on a single task (such as your current work project) in this multi-tasking day and age. Something that’s helped me to differentiate between the different tasks at hand has been the use of “virtual desktops”. Most people out there (especially if you’re reading this blog) have an idea of what the desktop is. Basically it’s a folder that contains some items and is what you are looking at when there are no windows open. Now most people are very comfortable with the idea of having one of these.
But I propose that you start to think about how useful it would be to have multiple desktops.
“Why would this be useful?” you might ask. Well in the aforementioned problem, we did not have the self-control to stop from occasionally glancing at the news or email and effectively kill our workflow. Whether that means losing your place in your spreadsheet, or forgetting what the current for loop does, or whatever it may be, it’s a hindrance to being all that you can be in the workplace. And that’s not good.
So if you place your project on one “desktop” and your other stuff on another “desktop,” you will be able to go to your project and not be as easily distracted! Additionally, something that I have tried and will try to continue to do more of is to “box” my time. That is, I will actually write down times that I am going to be doing this (i.e. an hour for this project). And for that hour, I will try as best as I can to shut out everything else and focus. I will try to drown out the noise with some cheap ear buds or even put in some ear plugs.
Now mind you, this isn’t a solution for your faults. If you still don’t have the self-control to not look at other things, then that’s your problem. And you’ll need other help.
Well this idea is definitely on Linux, and you can easily find references to it for both Gnome (which I do enjoy using) and KDE (which is nice in a different way). But if you are a fan of something other than these desktop environments (as I suspect that many of my readers are), then you might want to continue reading.
On Windows, I recently installed VirtuWin which has worked out pretty nicely. It’s fairly full-featured, and I can get it pretty much how I want it. Microsoft released their XP Power Toys awhile back that has an application called “Virtual Desktop Manager” that does a similar thing. Unfortunately I thought that it wasn’t very good the one time that I tried it out. So I avoided it on this most recent search.
On the Mac, you have the excellent VirtueDesktops which I have used and approve of. Unfortunately the developer for the project has decided to call it quits because the next upcoming release of Mac OS X (dubbed “Leopard”) includes a feature that is similar enough to VirtueDesktops to discourage a third-party from developing. This feature might be good, it might not be. But you can try out Spaces when Leopard is released sometime this year.
All in all, there are many things out there that will accomplish this task for you whatever your computing platform. Remember that the important issue is to become more efficient with your time and minimize interruptions to your workflow. Enjoy!