One specific kind of distraction I found interesting is the ‘valuable distraction’, where you get an interesting idea that is unrelated to your current task and which you in fact do not want to elude. My solution for preventing the new idea from getting me off-track is to use a low-bandwidth channel to communicate with my future self, which is a long way of saying sending myself a one-line email just supple enough to restore the memory context.
...which is pretty much equivalent to the writing down tip that I wrote—only that maybe for you emails are units easier to process.
Problem is that it takes some time to send an email. Really. I mean, not if you have three-four ideas a day, but if you have (like me) some dozens, the extra seconds of writing an email, multiplied by many emails, might become a barrier. So I prefer text files, and then I process them later.
+1, agreed. I think the difference is due to tool usage. Sending subject-only email to myself from iphone, which is almost always with me, is about 15 seconds. If you write you might be tempted to elaborate. Either way, this is what you said and I missed on a quick read.
One specific kind of distraction I found interesting is the ‘valuable distraction’, where you get an interesting idea that is unrelated to your current task and which you in fact do not want to elude. My solution for preventing the new idea from getting me off-track is to use a low-bandwidth channel to communicate with my future self, which is a long way of saying sending myself a one-line email just supple enough to restore the memory context.
...which is pretty much equivalent to the writing down tip that I wrote—only that maybe for you emails are units easier to process.
Problem is that it takes some time to send an email. Really. I mean, not if you have three-four ideas a day, but if you have (like me) some dozens, the extra seconds of writing an email, multiplied by many emails, might become a barrier. So I prefer text files, and then I process them later.
+1, agreed. I think the difference is due to tool usage. Sending subject-only email to myself from iphone, which is almost always with me, is about 15 seconds. If you write you might be tempted to elaborate. Either way, this is what you said and I missed on a quick read.