This is likely going to be the last post for 2025. I’ll start up again with regular content the first Saturday in January. We all need breaks and I’m taking one.

Time Track Your Interruptions

Adrian has a neat idea to flip time tracking around, track your interruptions instead of the time you spent doing something. This has the benefit of you seeing what and who interrupted you.

Right now I could say that my wife interrupted me with a request to bring her stuff at her work because she forgot it. That distracted me from writing during my blocked-out writing time.

If one person interrupts you regularly it’s worthwhile figuring out how to ensure they have everything they need to get their work done without needing to stop you from your task. If it’s a website that you keep getting sucked into, block it.

If you want to get stuff done, or just need to so you can keep your job, it’s worthwhile knowing what distracts you and making sure you can stay focused.

It’s easy to discount the cost of disruptions on your focus. An interruption doesn’t just cost you the time you focus on whatever came up, it costs you the ramp-up time to get back to a focused state as well. Just Off by One has a great visualization of how many days you get good work done based on the interruptions noted in several studies. As the post says, there is simply no time to work over 100 days once it models out interruptions and standard ramp up times.

There is not a single 60 minute block of focus available in his 100 days.

Those are just the interruptions coming from outside. The Slack messages or emails or IMs that someone sends us. That doesn’t even account for any interruptions we inflict on ourselves when we flip to Reddit or Mastodon and spend time meandering for a dopamine hit.

Interruptions cost us so much more than we think and they’re mere keystrokes away. I find they don’t just cost me focus, they cost me the enjoyment of my work. I like to code when I can sit down and focus on the task at hand for extended periods. I hate getting pulled away every few minutes and needing to come back to the task that had captured my attention.

Work is Always a choice

One of the insidious things about the interruption driven work day that many of us live is that outside of work our devices are always present. This means that work is always a choice. We can check for email, see what’s up with support, or respond to something quickly.

This steals the joy out of our time outside work though. It means we’re not spending time with the people around us, unless you count zombie half attention as quality time with those you care about.

It’s not even just work either. There is always something interesting on Reddit, at least that’s what we hope as we mindlessly scroll to find that dopamine hit.

It’s because work is always possible that I don’t install my work email on my phone. I only install our support app during the holidays when we take shifts monitoring support but are otherwise off. I can dip in and see if anything needs a response, if not I don’t go to my office to fire up my computer.

It’s because distractions are always possible that I put my phone in the kitchen and leave it there out of my pocket and out of easy reach most of the night. It was hard at first, but now it feels wrong to have my phone in my pocket walking around the house.

One bad side-effect has been my annoyance at the others in my house still chained to their devices. I realize how often I’m fighting through their phone to get any attention at all. When we’re hanging out as a family, I’m sitting there waiting for a fraction of focus amidst far too many interesting things on their phone.

Is a Read Later List Worth it?

Is a read later list worth it? Sure all those articles that flashed by had intriguing titles that draw you in. But really, how many of them are you going to go back and read with the focus they deserve? You didn’t do it in the moment, maybe because you were looking for something interesting during an interruption, and when are you next going to have a blank space to focus?

A few months ago I did a fairly large purge of my long list of content to read later, and I still have theoretically interesting content stretching back for years that I’ve never gotten to. Then take into account I’ve had many read later systems and never took the time to move all the content between them when I switched.

Is my “read later” list really a list of dead things I’m not going to get back to? We’d all like to be the type of person that does get through their list, but far too much content comes up that seems interesting. Certainly far more than we could ever read, even if we got to spend all our time reading.

During my holiday break I’m going to declare read later bankruptcy and delete everything I haven’t filed into a project in Obsidian. If it’s not relevant to a current writing project I don’t need it and will stumble across it again at some point in the future if it’s important enough.

Then I’m going to say goodbye to Readwise Reader. I’m not sure where I’ll save interesting links yet, or if I will at all. I am sure I need to declare bankruptcy far more often.

More interesting stuff will come up and I don’t need a list of stuff I’m never going to read.