Categories
productivity

Abstinence from the Computer

Turn your computer OFF !
Yes. I mean it. LifeDev has a beautiful post on how he did a 5 day PM Computer Fast. Read Fast as in abstinence (not as in Fast and Furious).
For 5 days, he turned off his computer in the evening 6PM for the evening. He switched it on only the next day morning. I think this is good advise.
He talks about the benefits of this in this nice post of his, the crux of it being:

Essentially, your mind will focus more if it knows that it only can work on something for X hours. When it knows that it doesn’t have the luxury of slacking off, it kicks it into the next gear and amazing results follow.

The same is true with my study. When I knew that the computer was going to be turned off at the same time every day, my productivity soared to new heights. Now that I only had a static, limited amount of time, I had to squeeze the most out of it. I had to plan, and only work on the most important things that had to be done that day.

This brought a smile to my face, because yesterday I did the same thing, and found it awesome, and was telling my wife about it. Infact, I was telling her that I think I should be doing this more often. I came home, and did not even take the laptop out (not even to check email). Usually I pop out the laptop to check email, and then I figure, I will post something in my blog, then I will meander to lifehacker, and then maybe feel guilty and code a little bit. This is what happens.

Check the full post here.

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