Comments on: Are we Pavlov’s dog to email, twitter, facebook?

By: Ankur Shukla

Ankur Shukla — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:28:38 +0000

Hi Indus,

Have you tried http://inbox2.com

Mite not solve all problems but maybe a few.

By: indus

indus — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:07:00 +0000

Agree. Looking for a tool which helps with this!

By: indus

indus — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:13:45 +0000

Good quote!

By: harishankaran

harishankaran — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:13:39 +0000

Knuth's famously eschews email telling Google co-founder Sergey Brin, a former student of his that:

'E-mail is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of
things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible
concentration.'

We aren't Knuth, but what he says works for all developers.. Maybe now knuth should add facebook, orkut and twitter to email.

By: sahilparikh

sahilparikh — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:37:57 +0000

Interruptions are terrible but it is the self-discipline that needs to be enforced. I am not sure a better or a more intelligent tool can solve this problem.

By: indus

indus — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:14:59 +0000

Very well put. The distractions are from the notifications than anything else. The world “alert” has become misnomer!

By: Sameer Guglani

Sameer Guglani — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:02:25 +0000

You have pointed to the right thing, specially for entrepreneurs, managing time & tasks without getting distracted is very important. While we think we are keeping in touch with the world; we are really wasting time by checking mails / reading tweets , readings SMSs and looking for @'s.

Some of things I try to follow to keep being from a dog :-:

- Close all e-mail windows except when I am actively checking mails
- Have zero unread mails end of every day
- Disable all notifications of new mails
- Disable notifications of people going online/offline on Skype
- No automatic mail downloads on my iPhone. Only manual checking
- Put my phone on silent before going to bed (or else I will be waking up to see some stupid SMSes)

And the most important thing which I learned from PG's maker vs manager article. I only do meetings / calls in the second half of the day and keep the first half for myself - to do some un-interrupted and continuous work.

By: indus

indus — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:55:17 +0000

Serious coding can only happen when the movement of anything does not touch you! If you worry about finishing things quicker to attend that con-call, then quality may suffer.

By: harishankaran

harishankaran — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:51:03 +0000

Totally agreed A fully focused developer session helps to produce bug free code, even if it is less lines of code. What I wanted to add is that even time-management is an interruption for an developer. It doesn't look as bad as fb, twitter or email, but that too does some damage..

Just wanted to see if everyone feels the same way..

By: indus

indus — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:46:01 +0000

The barrage of distractions is a whammy for developers writing code.

A non-interrupted developer session for 4 hours is more productive than a whole day effort interrupted with calls, emails and others.