A GREAT REMINDER.
This comes from an article on Fast Company written by Jane Porter…
One of the most common ways people choose to waste time is what psychologists James Baker and James Phillips call e-breaks—checking and responding to email as a way to avoid an actual task at hand. But they see these e-breaks as a form of “defensive avoidance”; not all that different from the morally substitutable acts Pychyl is interested in. According to their research, people who choose to e-break as a way to step away from their work tend to be more frequent procrastinators.
It makes sense. If someone is inclined to check email as a break from working on another task and email is simply a click away, the chances of succumbing to distraction are far more frequent than getting up to go to the vending machine.
DISTRACTIONS PLACE A STRAIN ON OUR COGNITIVE ABILITIES. IT CAN TAKE MORE THAN 20 MINUTES TO REGAIN FOCUS AFTER A SINGLE INTERRUPTION.
According to research from the University of California, Irvine
Ron Friedman, founder of the leadership consulting firm ignite80 likens compulsively checking and responding to email to dropping everything to run to the grocery store each time you discover you’re running low on an item in your cupboard. “It’s easy to see the cost of driving to the store every time we crave a bag of potato chips,” he writes in Harvard Business Review. “What is less obvious to us, however, is the cognitive price we pay each time we drop everything and switch activities to satisfy a mental craving.”
I know this already and have gotten a pretty good handle on emails, however, I have to wonder what the research says about compulsively posting a blog as a procrastination choice???
Read the full article here;
http://www.fastcompany.com/3039838/how-we-trick-our-brains-into-feeling-productive
From Vision to Reality 