Those of you familiar with Mac OS X know that you can set preferences so that icons in the dock bounce up into your line of vision to alert you to incoming mail and such.
I finally realized that I was spending all my time checking on the bouncing icons in my dock at the expense of finishing what I was doing. It wasn’t multi-tasking; it was more like serial distraction. I shut off the damnable bouncing, and all I can say is, “What took me so long?”
Now I can look at mail, or Twitter, or blog posts when I am ready. No more interrupting what I’m doing just to check a piece of mail that I may delete unread anyway.
A lot of very fine articles have been written about how to categorize your work day and only devote set times to certain tasks like email. I’m not trying to recreate that body of advice. I’m just saying, enough already with the bouncing icons.