Avoiding distraction

This week has been chaos for me. I’m trying desperately to rein in all the things I have and to find some focus on the tasks in hand. When everything is going to pot, how does one avoid being distracted?

I find now more than ever I wish I had a proper GTD system in place to guide me along. I’ve started using sticky notes in the top corner of my screen. Nothing major, just the next 3 tasks I have to do. It helps me focus.

I’m also using Pierre Chatel’s excellent Sidenote a lot. It’s a pop-out bar which contains simple text notes. However, I find the simple keyboard navigable interface makes it work for me. I can keep notes on the current project without getting scatter brained, and keep a couple of useful things on hand as well such as passwords I’m learning¹.

I’m hoping some of this stuff is going to make a difference, but I really need to get a cocoa bluetooth interface hacked up so I can sync notes onto my s60 phone. It’s really stupid there is nothing to do it right now. I’m sure other people are also gagging for it too. Actually, just transferring any files would be nice, like photos. Why the hell do I have to manually grab my photos and upload them to Flickr by hand?!

¹ For a few things I like really horrific passwords. We are talking 20 characters of case sensitive alphanumerics plus UNIX characters. I learn them by rote, normally takes me a few days, so it’s good to have them on hand. After that they are securely deleted. I don’t keep my passwords on post-it notes on my screen!

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