Page 21 - J2TEAM-Community-RescueTime-Focus-Guide

Although it can be difficult to escape from the cycle of busyness, doing
so opens up time for hard, important work.

Young suggests cutting back on your commitments to leave more room
for big projects. Newport similarly advocates doing fewer things better,
rather than spreading yourself too thin.

But Young also suggests being disconnected or hard to reach on
purpose. The more available and responsive you are, the more easily
other people can clutter up your life and eat up your time with their
own priorities.

It might sound extreme, but not having an account on every social
network, not leaving your status as “available” in chat programs during
work hours, or even not sharing your email address could open up
huge chunks of uninterrupted time for real work. By making it harder
for other people to contact you, you’ll ensure only very important
messages will reach you, and you’ll protect your time from busywork
and time-consuming requests.

Of course, the problem then becomes what to use as an excuse when
you want to avoid the hard work anyway...

It’s never easy to go against the grain, but in doing what seems
normal we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Our “normal” has become a
harmful habit of accepting all new, available technology into our lives,
regardless of how much value it really brings us.

Taking the time to re-evaluate the tools we use and how we spend our
time can be an eye-opening experience. And if we regularly evaluate
our choices and protect our time and attention, we may just be able to
avoid falling into that trap again.

But then, one of the tools we use is more of a problem than others: the