Choosing what single New Year’s Resolution would make the biggest difference in my life was easy: I just went over the last few weeks and compared the days I did this with the days I didn’t.
My New Year’s Resolution is not to check email or the web before noon. When I stick to this, I get things done – lines of code, paragraphs of prose, good ideas. When I don’t, I get involved in a dozen things, bounce through a couple of dozen sites and half dozen google searches only to look at time and realize I’ve frittered away what could and should have been a productive day.
I’m sure there will be times I falter, or rationalize a good reason to check email/web just once before noon. The saying, it’s not how many times a man gets knocked down that matters, it’s how many times he gets up, comes to mind.
People pay me for what I write. And until the day arrives somebody starts cutting me a check for checking email and falling down the rabbit hole of the web, enough is enough.
Anyone paying you to check email before noon?
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Yes, except …
The first thing I check for, and I check often for, is emails from customers or potential customers. Those I answer as quickly as possible. The rest I leave for when I have time.
RSS makes the web easy. I have my 50 sites I look at. It takes less than 10 minutes a day. They are important because they keep me up with the software I use and the current events of my field that I need to monitor (including great ISV sites like yours). The nice thing about IE 7′s built in Feed system is that it does not poll very often, so there are not often RSS updates to tempt me.
The only addition I got into in the last few months is Stackoverflow. I’ll have to restrict that to once per day and then I’ll be alright.