Some time ago, I blogged on minimizing distractions and keeping focus while you work. I even reviewed a couple of tools — YouTube Blog and Netvibes — to make our lives a bit easier. Sadly, in hindsight, I don’t always follow my own advice. I have been tremendously unproductive this 2007. I spend 12 or so hours in front of the computer most of the time with only 4 billable hours while the rest is spent on other things.

A few hours ago, Darren Rowse of Problogger blogged about how he’d been on dial-up for a week now and how it had made him more productive. Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to run an experiment. I dug my old external dial-up modem from our basement, plugged it in, and curiously, it still worked after two years of being buried in dirt. I went out and bought a prepaid dial-up card and began surfing the net on dial-up for the first time since early 2005.

My Experience Using Dial-up:

1. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon loaded sooooo slowly I decided to give up halfway. In effect, the hours I spent on social voting have been cut off. More hours for me to do actual work.

2. Job boards and other social networking web sites take forever to navigate so I moved elsewhere. In fact, a lot of web sites I frequent loaded so slowly I decided to give up and go straight to writing blog posts.

3. I was able to get things done in record time. What took me an hour to do on regular days using broadband took me only 15 minutes using dial-up. There were no distractions so I had no choice but to focus. Isn’t it funny how we have to be forced to work quickly so we’d have more time to ourselves?

4. I wasn’t checking my email every minute. Checking my email accounts is second nature to me. I always peek in every minute to see if I have anything new. And when I do get something, it takes me more time to send out a response. Since my email accounts load so slowly, I abandoned the habit (at least for now).

5. I wasn’t checking my blog stats like crazy. I believe Darren Rowse also mentioned the same thing. I don’t log in to access my stats every hour or so. That would mean more time saved.

6. It took time out of social networking as mentioned above. Although that means more time for me to work, we all know how important social networking is for probloggers. Posting in forums and similar on a regular basis is highly essential. If I’m stuck on dial-up forever, it would take me twice the time to network than when I use broadband.

7. It stretched out time needed to post. While posting in WordPress is as easy as 1-2-3, it takes some time using dial-up. You have to wait for the panel to load and then wait before you can see the preview and then afterwards, wait again for the panel to load when you see something wrong in your post that you want to change.

8. It took a LOT of time navigating through my blogs to find the right posts to interlink to. While I had suggested a number of ways to make interlinking posts easier, I hadn’t been able to implement any of my own advice for some of my blogs. In the end, I was the one who had to suffer. I kept egging the loading process on like a mad woman. Suffice it to say although I had been productive today, I had also been extremely antsy.

9. I missed replying to important emails. A couple of important emails arrived earlier (as of now, I’ve switched back to broadband) and I’ve been able to reply only five hours later. While this might not be an issue for some, one of the emails was quite urgent in nature.

And that about summarizes my six hours using dial-up. In the end, I’ve been raring to get my broadband connection back. I guess I’ll leave it all up to self-discipline next time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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