Timeboxing, an update July 7, 2012

More on my timeboxing efforts

A few weeks back, I wrote about timeboxing… my efforts to reign in the craziness that are all the methods by which I consume information and am connected to others.

So far, the experiment has been very successful.

I turn Twitter on a few times a day… mostly on my iPad. This leads to fewer interrupts.

Using Pocket to store the stuff I want to read is awesome, although I have a backlog of 900+ items to read on Pocket. I plan to read these while on vacation next week.

I sometimes check email during compiles, but mostly I keep many groups of editor windows open and while one chunk of code is compiling, I do work on other code. Mainly it's trading among Telegram, Hoisted, and research for Lift 3.0.

I read email periodically (about once every 90 minutes) and do not "switch to email" each time a message arrives. I've also set my email apps to poll at a 1 hour interval and not give any alert when new messages arrive.

How it feels

It feels great to choose to connect rather than having every connection be an interrupt. It feels liberating.

I have also been getting a pile of work done on Telegram… although to be fair, Telegram is a project that's a big pile easier than Visi.

In August, I'm going to be back working on Visi because by then, Telegram will be at a nice state and I need to get some cool stuff into Visi for the Emerging Languages conference.

Overall, I strongly recommend timeboxing. I will continue to be the master of my time.