alex.mullr.net/blog

Rumour (well, the YSTV quotes board) has it that I once said, when asking for confirmation on something television-related: “I have the attention span of a raccoon!” I think I’ve started to have problems with the tiny length of time I can keep focused on a task…

Something that I’ve been noticing increasingly lately is that the more “stuff” that gets thrown at me, the more I’ve reduced the amount to which it can bother me. When I started out with a Mac Mini and 4:3 display a couple of years ago, I had Google Notifier set up to make an obscene noise, show me my unread email count and display an overlay with the new message summary. I had system wide notifications set up for IMs, tweets, iTunes changing. In short, my computer was really annoying.

Since then, I’ve switched off pretty much everything. Tweets appear in the background, and I’ll read them if I want. New instant message conversations show a tiny exclamation mark in the menu bar. Google Notifier… well, I actually just quit Google Notifier. I want to see how long I can do without it, but hope this is the start of something productive. Honestly, didn’t realise how much all that stuff pained me until I got rid of it, and I don’t think I’ll be going back.

So consider this a poke for you to do something about your pain-in-the-arse computer; the revelation that the world won’t implode if I don’t reply to email just hit me, and it feels good.