Wait, I thought this was about paper planes?

Yeah, I know, two posts, in three days, and NO pictures of project plans turned into airplanes! OK, before you come after me with pitchforks, let me assure you, there WILL be planes, some in various states of construction used to make points.
However, today I wanted to just share some thoughts from a book I'm reading, I'll share more about the book later, but it's not important to this thought. So according to this book I'm reading, the average employee spends between just 30 minutes and an hour productive a day. 8 hour day, and they're only productive for an hour TOPS? How is that possible? Then, I started looking at my day, observing how I spend it. While I may be way above that average, but still lose vast amounts of time per week on things that take me away from coding. Based on what I saw, the biggest two time sinks in my environment were email and IM. Now, I'm not talking about Yahoo or gtalk, although those certainly can be time wasters, I'm talking about the typical work related stuff. It's work stuff, taking away from work time. How's this possible? Many times, the simple interruption of even a notification on email or IM are enough to throw off your train of thought JUST enough to keep you out of your sweet spot for a couple minutes. A minute here, two minutes there add up quickly, especially in demanding environments.
As an experiment, I decided to try something for a day, that is, I left Outlook and IM off, and only turned both on for a couple minutes during compile times, which are normally dead periods, and if I hadn't built in an hour, I opened Outlook once an hour on the hour. The results, were incredible. I got more accomplished in that one day, than I could have imagined, and it seemed like I wasn't working as hard.
I'll keep you informed about this experiment in future posts, and share more from this book I'm reading too.
For those of you who may be too impatient to wait, the book is Simpleology by Mark Joyner, great book on productivity and reaching goals.

Until next time......