Goal of the month: NetWorker

At work, I use the Internet. All the time. Above the local network stuff (HR, internal memos, and the like), I am constantly doing research about various items in my work life.

However, the Internet is also quite the distraction. Yes, I can get sucked into Slashdot and lose an hour. But also in more insidious ways. For example, checking my e-mail. It's great to stay on top of things, but nervously checking it every five minutes is not helpful to my work flow. (Yes, I have been known to do this, mostly when expecting confirmation or a reply.)

Anyway, this month my goal is to get more productivity out of my Internet time (or around my Internet time). Specifically, my resolutions come in two forms: a prohibition and several limits.

Prohibition: No idle browsing

That means no clicking onto Slashdot because I'm bored. If I'm bored, there's probably a reason, and the reason is probably that I am avoiding doing something.

This also includes Slickdeals and other deal sites, which can be real time-sinks for me as I peruse the deals and think about them. To help with this tendency, I've created a custom RSS feed (using Yahoo's Pipes) to go through all the deal sites I could find and filter out the mess, to return just the things I'm looking for. It's worked well so far (I've found one or two pertinent things and ignored countless "deals" that wouldn't be deals to me.)

Daily limits

My feed reader: 1x. I use RSS to catch up with my favorite websites, and to put reading material on my Palm for later perusal. However, checking my feed reader more than once a day is wasteful. Indeed, an RSS reader functions as an aggregator, so I don't have to check multiple places for information. What I'm planning now is a similar aggregation, only across time: checking just once a day will still get me all the information.

E-mail: 5x. I will check both my personal and business mail only five times daily, maximum. Tentatively, these five times will be allotted as follows:
* once in the morning, after I arrive to my office
* once just after lunch
* once before leaving work
* two discretionary times
This should free me up to do more work with fewer interruptions.

What to do instead

With all the time freed up by not browsing idly and aggregating tasks across time, what should I do? My focus is going to be on my to-do list. That is, not things that pop into my head on their own, but things that have "made the cut" and are already on my list. This should help me filter out spurious "urgencies" and make room for important things that I might otherwise neglect.

That should leave me room to get my workday (and life) in better shape.