Monday, May 11, 2009

distractions, distractions

The single most distracting thing that keeps me from getting work done, beside my own reflection in the mirror, is the internet. I've been paying more attention lately to the amount of time I spend on the web each day, and I'm not shocked, but deeply bothered at how the minutes slip away and turn into big chunks of time. I spend a certain amount of time each day taking care of essential computer tasks, which include : uploading new listings to etsy, communicating with my customers, and printing out ship tags and invoices. Those are the essentials. Then there are the little add-ons: reading blog comments, writing blog posts, monitoring traffic on my web and etsy site, updating my website, and then twittering about everything I just did.

But it doesn't stop there. While I'm uploading etsy listings, I'm sneaking over to the front page to see what fantastic stuff is on there. If I see something cool, I'm off into someone's shop, rooting around in the goods. Twitter has started sucking me off onto all kinds of websites and blogs. Every Wednesday I must read the new horoscopes and Savage Love. And the emails and communications with customers, potential customers, stores, etc, is absolutely endless. If I added up all the time I spend on the web and compared it to the amount of time I spend actually making stuff in the studio, I think I would see I'm losing a day a week just to the interwebs, and a large portion of that to non-essential tasks.

And I don't even LIKE working on the computer very much. It stresses out my neck and makes me feel all starey-eyed.

I'm going to start instituting some severe discipline on myself. I only have a couple of ideas to keep myself on track: Make a list of what HAS to get done on the computer, give myself a time frame to do it in, and don't stop ticking down the list until it's done. No gallivanting off into cute little shops or reading blogs. But I need some more ideas, and I know everyone reading this is guilty of the same type of behavior. So I'm going to do my part in keeping you distracted from what you actually should be doing right now and ask what YOU do to keep yourself on track.