Most productivity gurus will tell you:

“Don’t check your email every 5 minutes.”
“Reserve your mornings for intense, productive work. Don’t check email until the afternoon (or check it 1x per week or less)”

I’m going to tell you something completely different:

“Check your email as many times as you want.”
“Read RSS feeds in the morning instead of doing productive work.”

…sorry, just got back. I was checking my email while my brain figured out how to write the next section of this article. Oh, and I also fired up a cigarette.

See what I just did there? I used the power of distraction to move past a potentially painful mental sticking point. Hmm. Interesting. How come nobody talks about that?

Well, actually, there’s a very good reason. Nobody else has a productivity system that enables frictionless gear-shifting.

Checking your email constantly or reading RSS feeds in the morning is a potential disaster if you can’t efficiently file info for later action or cogitation. If you can’t efficiently defer cognitive bits, then these distractions will create anxiety-charged open loops in your mental RAM, reducing your capacity to focus for the rest of the day.

However, Cyborganize gives you the power to efficiently defer unlimited amounts of information. Which allows you to enjoy the BENEFITS of distraction, without paying the price.

Here are the benefits:

• A steady flow of inspiration and entertainment (yay dopamine)
• Mental unsticking and transitioning
• Enrichment from accumulated micro-reading
• Faster response time, while maintaining uninterruptibility of work blocks
• Greater network engagement

For example, this article is a result of a conversation I was desultorily having during focus breaks at outlinersoftware.com. I was just doing it for entertainment hits and the pleasure of thought elaboration. But I stored the results in a scratch file because it was interesting. A day or two later, I came across the scratch file again, and saw the germ of a thesis. The article was easy to write, because I already had direct feedback from my network, which is my target audience.

That’s just a partial example. Next, I’ll go over each of the benefits in detail.

A steady flow of inspiration and entertainment

This one is obvious.

Checking your email is fun. Reading RSS is fun. If you’re doing hard work, you need some entertainment to keep your state from crashing.

Most forms of entertainment are delivered in big blocks. This isn’t efficient. You can get your needed dopamine hit in a minute or less, and then happily go back to work. But the effect fades after 30 minutes or 3 hours or whatever, and then you need another one. So it’s more efficient to have lots of small, short dopamine hits than one big one.

In fact, consuming larger forms of entertainment can actually be less enjoyable, because we get used to the pleasure sensation quickly, so it becomes less intense. And we start to feel bad for wasting so much time, and start worrying about getting back to work. But we also want to finish the entertainment, e.g. finish watching the movie. Very suboptimal.

Inspiration is very, very similar to pleasure. Reading a good article or an interesting email jars loose lots of related concepts and half-forgotten memories. But too much inspiration and insights start overwriting each other. It becomes stressful, because you feel like you’re losing important ideas before you can gestate and capture them. You can’t focus on getting the most out of the current inspiration, because you’re too busy trying to remember the previous one.

So both inspiration and pleasure are best spread out through the day in small hits. Email and RSS are excellent lightweight chunked delivery mechanisms for this.

And Cyborganize makes deferral easy. With email, if something requires further organization, just scan and star it. With RSS, take notes into your chron tapes and scratch files. Then go back to your real work, refreshed by a 1 minute micro-break.

Mental unsticking and transitioning

Micro-breaks improve the quality of your work. This is because of the way your r-mode works.

(R-mode is roughly equivalent to the right brain or subconscious mind. Read “Refactor Your Wetware” for details.)

The r-mode is sort of like a pot on a stove. It never boils if you watch it. Or it’s like a girl getting dressed – she’s shy about letting you watch the process, but happy to show you the finished product.

I suspect the r-mode is just embarrassed about the weird, illogical, discontinuous way that it solves problems. But the reasons don’t matter. The fact is, it gets shy when solving hard problems. A gentleman looks away.

When writing the beginning of this article, I “looked away” after the introduction, to do the necessary cogitation to formulate my thesis paragraph. While my r-mode worked over this problem, I checked my email and scanned my RSS reader. I didn’t actually read anything, because I was too distracted. I just briefly looked stuff over to see what had come in.

This created the necessary mental space for my r-mode to evaluate the tradeoffs, context, big picture, etc, and come up with a best-fit thesis.

Evaluating all of that, weighing all those tradeoffs and structuring all that context, could’ve been a stressful and involved process. I could feel the stress building as I considered the scope of the problem. Rather than face it head on, I ejected and went for a dopamine hit. During the ensuing brief distraction, the problem automatically resolved itself, without me having to do any actual work.

Pretty neat, huh?

The important thing is that the distraction was light enough that it didn’t interrupt the flow of my work session. You need to calibrate the magnitude of your distractions to fit the amount of r-mode cogitation required.

For example, most of my “look aways” when writing this article were nothing more than moments where I stopped typing and took a drag of my cigarette. For a more complex problem, I might physically get up and walk around, or even defer the problem for days or weeks. Cyborganize accomodates any distraction length while minimizing voltage drop (the loss of contextual info).

It is far more efficient to properly use distraction to power past sticking points. Unfortunately, few people have an organizational system that comprehensively accomodates distraction. Therefore, they learn to fear and avoid distraction, because it fragments and destroys their information workflow.

Enrichment from accumulated micro-reading

Another obvious benefit of frequent micro-reading is that you can read more, and think more about what you read.

Read a book at one go, and you’ll get the main points. Read a single article at one go, and you’ll get the main points. Same amount of takeaway, vastly different time investment.

Filling your RSS reader with quality sources is an excellent way to become conversant in a field. The you’ll be qualified to join the conversation.

Faster response time, while maintaining uninterruptible work blocks

Obviously if you frequently check your email, you can respond quickly to those that are urgent.

What’s not obvious is that this allows you to deprioritize other more interruptive forms of communication, such as phone, chat, or physical proximity.

Communication is either push or pull. You control when you consume pull communication. The sender controls when you receive push communication. Email is pull. Phone, chat and face-to-face are push.

You cannot prevent push communication from interrupting your focused work blocks. And that is the worst form of interruption. It is unnecessary interruption, it destroys your focus, it causes voltage drop, it takes you out of flow, etc. It does everything that all the gurus warn you about when they give reasons to avoid all distraction.

Well, those aren’t reasons to avoid ALL distraction. But they ARE reasons to avoid push distraction.

If you check email frequently, you can tell others to reach you that way, and only that way.

Greater network engagement

You can stay in much better constant contact with people if you’re doing it in micro chunks throughout the day.

This includes sending and receiving emails, and reading RSS feeds.

Most niches will have a bunch of people posting about it in blogs and other RSS-able formats. Often they’ll have interesting things to say, and be valuable people to know. You can engage with them if you make time for your RSS reader.

Keep in mind that engaging with bloggers was how Tim Ferriss launched his bestsellers.

Also, note that the look-away method works for email as well. If a big email comes through, and you star it for later, your mind will churn on it in the background. The resulting solution will be far better than if you tried to solve it on the spot.

My ultra-lazy morning productivity ritual

There are a few major periods where I entertain distraction throughout the day:

• Morning – I’m bleary, hungry, eyes aren’t working, and my mind’s foggy.
• During meals – I can’t type while I’m eating, so I don’t want to do anything that would inspire me to take notes.
• Evening – when I’m winding down and looking for entertainment, but not revved up for work.

I want to deal particularly with the morning ritual, because so many gurus emphasize feats of morning self-discipline. I mean stuff like meditation, or planning your day, or working out, or going straight into a mega-work session. Basically the last things you want to do when you roll out of bed with your eyeballs stuck to your eyelids.

I say screw all that noise. I prefer to wake up as slowly and gracelessly as I please, and take my damn time doing it. I want to do absolutely NOTHING productive until the precise millisecond I feel like it.

And guess what? Extreme laziness like this, as long as it doesn’t lead to lowered productivity, is extremely de-stressing. It sets the stage for you to work all day without fatigue or emotional burnout. Whereas, if you hammer yourself with cortisol in the morning to “get going” hard, you’re far more likely to burn out later in the day, and need to party hard to decompress, or engage in some equivalent behavior. Ahem.

So, here’s my morning routine:

• Roll out of bed without alarm clock.
• Stumble over to computer
• Check email and RSS
• Read until I become sufficiently sentient to light a cigarette
• While I am reading, something interesting will pop up. Fear of loss will force me to take notes. Bam, I’m already using Cyborganize. First barrier cleared.
• As I continue reading, thoughts develop, forcing deeper engagement with Cyborganize. Activity becomes less reactive and more proactive, as I write my own thoughts, perhaps compose an article, or capture actionables.
• Once awake, I scan quickly through the remainder of the RSS and email queues, eager to begin executing the day in prioritized order. By now I’ve remembered what I was working on last night, and am thinking about that more than the relatively boring RSS and email stuff.

Now if I just jumped out of bed and immediately tried to recollect everything I was working on yesterday, what my endpoint was, all the context, and what I should be doing today, that would be mega-hard and stressful. I’d start the day out depressed and overwhelmed.

Instead, I use the “gentleman looks away” technique. I sit down at the computer, do something else for a bit, and all the context flows back via the process of reengaging with Cyborganize. By the time I finish my RSS and email, I am fully embedded in work mode. And it happened automatically, an unintended result of indulging my laziness and vices.

Now THAT’S a productivity method.