Just read a good piece called The Asymptomatic Twitter Curve. It picks on Twitter specifically, but the premise is that with phone calls, text messages, emails, instance messages, and compulsive RSS reader checking, we’re trapping ourselves into a world where we’re constantly distracted and can’t ever just stop and focus on what we’re doing. In the spring we fired a temp because he couldn’t stop text messaging long enough to get any work done. This isn’t very new ground here (except pointing out Twitter as the newest distraction) — people have been ranting for a long time that the best way to get things done is to stop and focus on one thing at a time.
The other day Kenjisan wrote a about a Culture of Delay. TiVo and Netflix are designed to be implements of delayed gratification, as opposed to instant, on-demand services. RSS is much like this, too. These tools do a great job of letting us not worry about what’s going on right now. I don’t have to worry about missing something, because TiVo will record it for me. I don’t have to check a given website, because Google Reader will check it for me.
The irony here is that since my RSS reader will always be checking sites for me, I know I can check it at any given moment and there will probably be something new for me to read. Instead of being a tool that lets me set my own schedule, it ends up being a greater distraction. Now, as I said, this isn’t a particularly new rant. One thing I do to combat this at work is that I have Thunderbird set to only check for new mail every 30 minutes, instead of interrupting me every time a new message comes in. See 43 Folders for way more productivity tips than you probably need.