Mac/iPhone

Focussing on important apps

• Backdrop is a tool I’ve mentioned before. The aim is simple; it blacks out your screen allowing you to pick only the essential applications to focus on.
• WriteRoom is a decent text editor that uses the same black-out effect as Backdrop, allowing you to concentrate purely on writing.

Removing notifications

• Growl notifications seemed like a good idea once-upon-a-time. More often than not, they serve only as an annoyance and break my concentration.
• I’ve disabled iPhone push notifications for Mail as e-mail is never important enough that I need to read it straight away

Online

The key question that I kept coming back to as I sifted through this mess is

How does this support my life as it is now?

Unsubscribing from e-mail alerts

I’ve unsubscribed from the following e-mail alerts:

• Facebook notifications (57 different notification types in all!)
• Twitter user follows
• Google alerts
• Dozens of music and tech mailing lists

Knowing that my level of e-mail will now drop, I’m less inclined to check it as often.

Unsubscribing from blog RSS feeds

I had 82 feeds in my feed reader, and I realised that I read new items from them very rarely. I’ve now unsubscribed from all but 3;

• MiÅ¡ko Hevery
• myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity
• Code: Flickr Developer Blog

I’m sure these actions will be helpful in the long run, I am hoping this is a step towards a less overwhelming environment.