Martine Pagé

It took me surprisingly long to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the problem was intermittent. I ignored it the way you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. When I was in the middle of a project, distractions weren’t really a problem. It was when I’d finished one project and was deciding what to do next that they always bit me.

Another reason it was hard to notice the danger of this new type of distraction was that social customs hadn’t yet caught up with it. If I’d spent a whole morning sitting on a sofa watching TV, I’d have noticed very quickly. That’s a known danger sign, like drinking alone. But using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.

Eventually, though, it became clear that the Internet had become so much more distracting that I had to start treating it differently. Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox.

Read the rest of this post titled Disconnecting Distraction at Paul Graham’s Web site. Thanks to Mare for the link.

When Karl (on s’ennuie) was living in Montreal, he used to escape to the coffee shop at Chapters on Sainte-Catherine every afternoon because they didn’t offer wifi. He claimed to have gotten a lot more work done this way, and I always admired him for his will power. (Then again, he might have substituted meeting women for using wifi, so I don’t know how much he actually got done by « isolating » himself in the bookstore ;-)

Maybe I should do what Paul Graham suggests in his blog post. Maybe I should use my laptop for going online, and keep the iMac for offline work. I suspect it would drive me insane pretty quickly, but it’s worth a try, if only for a week.