Don't Read Morning Feeds

Philip Greenspun blogs his new article on Early Retirement, something that interests me. In the section on Time Management, he comments:

don't read the newspaper or email in the morning because it will scramble your brain with lots of disconnected ideas and you won't be able to accomplish any serious work for the rest of the day (very productive friend who has just completed his fourth book)

For me, this means:  go to your aggregator at night, not in the morning. My focus at work suffers most on days when I pop over to the aggregator in the morning, just to see what's going on. Then I'll get engrossed in reading something, then maybe even blog about it. I get into this habit at lunch time sometimes too. Case in point:  this entry. :-)

Comments

Brad Isaac Brad Isaac
Jan 30, 2006

Surfing later is always better than surfing earlier. But it's easier said than done. If you have a job that relies on email, it can be so easy to check email and then glide over to the web browser. Or worse, someone sends you an important link in the body of the email so it's an automatic conversion from email to surfing.

I try to use web/RSS reading as a reward for doing good work on a project. Work first, surf later.

Lord Christopher of The Evil White Conservatives of Peckerwoodshire Lord Christopher of The Evil White Conservatives of Peckerwoodshire
Feb 16, 2006

Roger That...
I don't typically read anything until about 10am... so I'm working on only ideas in my head when I woke up, for the first few hours of the day... then I have to get distracted... lest I not respond to various customers who will then have me fired.

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