Personal Development For Distracted People

I've been experimenting for a while with ways to increase my personal productivity.  My business is at the stage now where I have more enquiries than I can cope with, but not enough cash to invest in much extra help.  To make matters worse I haven't optimised for multiple operators on a lot of what  I do, so I can't yet easily delegate quite a lot of the stuff. 

I have been cutting down a lot on Twitter, but I noticed that yesterday - which was a rather disrupted day due to having to do a long drive mid morning - had me creeping back onto it.  Fun as it was I got to bed relatively late.  I think I am going to have to impose a strict ban on it during the week.  It isn't so much the time I spend on the platform itself as the mental cycles it takes up thinking about it between sessions.  I suppose it is all part of being a social animal.   The reason Twitter is so addictive is that it forms a social group.  It is quite likely our brains developed to cope with the social interactions of living in a group.  Twitter provides that.

I really want to get into the habit of waking up early and starting work straight away.  I realised that the biggest obstacle to that was my Twitter habit.  I think I have neutralised that by making the first thing I do in the morning a Duolingo session.  This works very well as it forces me to concentrate and now I have got up to 85 concurrent sessions I am very motivated to do it.  As a side effect, it is improving my language skills, albeit slowly.  So once I have done that I am ready to roll, but I am still pretty low in energy and so although I am getting some stuff done I am not really ploughing into it all with the great effect I think I should be.  I think I can tackle this in two ways.  The first is to get into the habit of doing some regular activities that have relatively low levels of brain-power required.  The obvious one is getting my books up to date. I can only do this with a laptop - my phone isn't really up to it in the way it ...

I really love Twitter and when I have nothing else to do I can often spend hours on it.  The trouble is, it is rather too easy to spend hours on it even when I have something to do.  I noticed that when I stayed off Twitter during the General Election campaign I got rather more done on my real work.  Since then my Twitter habit has rapidly returned to normal and my output has dropped with bad effects on my bank balance. But can I live without it?  I am going cold turkey today to find out. 8:28am First twinge.  I have overcome it, but there are already signs this is going to be harder than I thought.  I'll adopt the strategy of substituting some other activity whenever the blue bird pops into my mind. 8.50am Done approximately an hour more work than I usually get done by this time.  Not yet getting the main benefit I was looking for, which is a clear mind.  Still thinking up witty aphorisms, pithy comments and knock out comebacks.  Sadly...

I'm not a Labour Party member so I don't get to vote for the new leader.  I'm not especially fussed about the result.  I quite like nearly all the candidates.  The only exception is Richard Burgon who I think comes across as narrow minded and way way too partisan.  I really like Emily Thornbury who has a nicely sassy attitude.  But I think all the other non-Burgon hopefuls are pretty good.

One idea that has long fascinated me is dictating rather than writing my work. In my head, it would make the whole process faster and more efficient. I gave it a try quite a few years ago when doing so involved purchasing special software and training it to recognise your voice. It was far from successful. Accuracy was very low, and it was almost impossible to edit as I went along.

I was an early adopter of the internet and got online via a CD that offered me access via AOL.  It came sellotaped to the front of a computer magazine, that being the way that software was propogated in those days.  I'd been tempted by the prospect of easy access to information, which in turn would be an advantage to my career.  I got the information, but found that it was no longer as advantageous as I anticipated.  Everyone else managed to get hold of it as well.  But nonetheless I was still happy that I wasn't falling behind.