So I made a few changes to the way I do things last week as part of the media fast and The 4-Hour Work Week change. There were two things that made a major difference.

Only Read Email Twice A Day

The book suggests you only check email twice a day, and the first time is at noon. This made a huge difference because in general email contains something that I need to do, or something that distracts me. Which gets me off on side lines and away from the main thing.

By not checking email I was able to focus on working on specific, important things from the beginning in the morning. I’ve gotten more done at work in the last week than I have in the last month.

At work I can only check my email using a web browser, and my not checking it first thing in the morning, I don’t open a browser for hours. Which helps me not just click over during a compile and stay there for 10 minutes to an hour.

Which relates to another major change.

Don’t Read Blogs
The media fast says not to watch the news on TV, or read news sites online. I don’t really do either one of those things, but I read a lot of blogs via RSS. And RSS makes it feel like it is a task to be completed. One that isn’t that hard to do, just get that list read. So when a task that is hard to do – like figure out which bytes are not getting swapped – I could switch to the easy, reading blogs.

With no browser open and no RSS feeds to read, I just went back to byte swapping.

So I’m going to trim down my RSS list, to maybe 10 blogs. Mostly people I enjoy reading.

Conclusion
This media fast has helped me figure out what really needs to be done and what is just fat in my brain diet. That will make a huge difference in what and how much I get done.