from Vielmetti Blog

My
days have some combination of long stretches of mostly heads-down work
on one topic, and interrupt-ridden times where my attention goes from
one task to the next just as quickly as it can. Sometimes I get flow, sometimes I get thrash. I like "flow" better.

I've been enjoying reading David Allen's weblog,
trying to get some ideas for how to deal with interrupts that come in
faster than once every two minutes - Allen suggests that if you get
something small in your field of view that would only take two minutes
you should just do it. But how to handle things that appear faster than
that? (Perhaps the answer is, don't carry devices or run software that
does that to you).

One approach is to physically pick up and move every few hours, and
use the travel time to be offline for a little bit and to let my head
clear. Some priorities look a lot more clear if you're not in the
middle of the trenches.

A second that I'm still pretty happy about is to keep my email inbox
down to zero and sweep anything that is important but not urgent into
an action folder, to be done later. That action folder doesn't always
get split-second response, but it does all get done. I'm sure there's
some variant on that that would work better - I do try to sweep work
mail in a different direction than personal mail, as a first pass cut.