Law Students

Simplification – Part II

By Athar Khan

A couple of days after that last post, it occurred to me that simplification need not be limited to physical objects. My life is cluttered with plenty of other distractions such as email, social networking sites, and even people. So, I used Rescue Time to track my activities on my personal laptop. I found that I was spending a shockingly disproportionate amount of time processing email, keeping in touch with contacts, and participating in networking sites.

First, I used a combination of Xobni and X1 to estimate a ratio of how often I initiated the conversation. Using this approach, I was able to delete about 2425 contacts which I had added to my email addressbook over the last 10 years. There were indeed plenty of people that I would have loved to stay in touch with because they were “important” but I figured that having an important person’s contact information did me no good if that person wasn’t particularly interested in keeping in touch with me. Perhaps it was a hint that I should have taken a long time ago.

Now, when I visually scan my addressbook, at least I can identify (somewhat) more quickly, the people I have not spoken to or corresponded with in some time. It also eliminates the guilt of failing to keep in touch.

Then, I installed LeechBlock, a FireFox extension that limits the amount of time that I can spend on any given website. Looking at my Rescue Time statistics for this week, I didn’t waste much time at all.

Full post as published by Atharkhan on June 19, 2009 (boomark / email).