Selective, Mindless Procrastination can Help You Keep Focus

Hey all,

Stupid as it may sound, this worked for me.

Over recent weeks I’ve been working through my A2 level revision, and at first I found myself, as usual, a slave to distraction. Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, YouTube, Kongregate; all of them called to me constantly, and quite often I listened.

Many of us have fairly extensive media libraries on our computers, and assumedly more or less all of us have music on their computers that they listen to fairly often. I personally enjoy listening to music most of the time, especially when working.

I’m one of those kinds of people – you know, the ones who always have to have things organised, know where things are, etc? My computer file system has so many subdirectories I should probably use a tree view, and I’ve set up everything exactly how I want them, down to window position, tweaked down to the pixel. (I kid ye not…)

I’ve become the same with my music collection. I want to have everything rated, but I can’t be bothered to sit there and go through all 917 songs (ok, not a huge collection, but big enough) rating each one.

The Solution to Problem A – Ratings:

I assigned a global hotkey for each rating, easily done in Mediamonkey’s (my current favourite media player by far) options. I found that Alt+Shift+(whatever) works well, as Firefox, Word, OneNote and Windows Live Writer (the programs I’m likely to be using while listening to music) don’t seem to be using those combinations. Simple! Now rating is as easy as a keystroke, and just as easily forgotten about while I get on with … whatever.

Make sure you check the box on the right to make the individual hotkeys global, or they won’t do anything while another window is in focus.

 The Solution to Problem B – Procrastination:

After setting up Mediamonkey I could easily and quickly rate my songs as they played without looking up from whatever I was working on at the time.

That was when I noticed something strange: the simple act of mindlessly rating songs as I worked offered me a kind of simple, fleeting procrastination every few minutes or so, but not something which required that I stopped working for more than a second at a time. Thus, my urge to waste time (checking Facebook, looking at WordPress.com stats, etc…) was greatly reduced! I found myself staying on-task much easier and for longer at a time!

This could be applied to other, perhaps less sad, methods of wasting a tiny bit of time every few minutes if you’re not as regimental with your files, here’s a couple of ideas, but you get the gist:

• Get up and walk around the room once every x minutes. (You should do this anyway actually)
• For martial artists: have some kind of target or pad up by your desk. Every paragraph/page/milestone/few minutes, hit it.
• Allow yourself to check your Facebook only after set intervals or milestones.

Got any better ideas? Did this work for you? If not, what does? I’ll be watching the comments… :)