I had a very productive day yesterday. I could attribute this to a number of things; for example, I’ve noticed that lines of code written is inversely proportional to number of biscuits consumed. It could also be that I’m feeling extremely motivated by what I’m working on.
However, I made a change yesterday that I think was much more likely to have had an effect.
I turned off Growl.
(For those who don’t use it, Growl is a little utility that provides desktop notifications for a whole range of apps.)
Here’s when it pops up:
- HipChat gets a message
- Twitter finds a mention
- Rdio changes track
- Transmit finishes transferring
- Codekit’s done compiling
- Skype message
- Cloudapp’s finished uploading
- more…
Given that I’m on HipChat all day, use Twitter, Codekit and Cloudapp heavily and have Rdio on all the time, that’s a fair few notifications. But I didn’t realise how heavily I was being bombarded until suddenly there was silence.
It was fantastic.
Seriously, try it. Detach yourself from real-time updates and find your focus again.