(10+2)x5

I haven't had any work to do in the last few days, but before that, I had all kinds of final projects. I had bidness to handle. I'm pretty averse to work most of the time-- even when I feel like I should sit down and get some stuff done, I'll just waste time on the internet, or go check the mail, or even clean the house to avoid working. To be honest, it's a problem.

Last week, I downloaded Konfabulator because, well, downloading software is decidedly not writing papers. Anyway, Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets or something, ugh) is like the Dashboard Widgets for OSX: it runs little programs, mostly user-created that you can keep on your desktop. I took a screenshot of my desktop to give you an example. I've got a little volume control deal, and a clock, and sometimes I run weird shit like an HTML color picker, or a Netflix queue lister, or a little Quagmire head that plays Family Guy quotes when you click on it. You know, your basic resource-wasting stuff. But my use of this program had an unexpected side effect: productivity.

See that little red timer thing?

It's based on this time management idea from 43 Folders, which is a site all about organization and time management type stuff. I like to read some of the planning stuff when I am, uh...

so anyway, the timer counts down from 10 minutes, then turns green and counts down for 2 minutes, over and over. The idea is that I work for 10 minutes, then I screw around on the internet for 2. Five reps, and that's an hour of mostly-work. Not bad. I don't know if any of you guys have the same laziness/distraction problems that I have, so I don't know if this is helpful.