The first thing I do when I get to work is turn on my laptop. While it’s booting up I make my chapstick easily accessible on my desk, get some water, take my morning dose of Adderall and arrange my favorite pens on my desk next to my laptop. Then I open Mozilla, wait for all my saved tabs to load, and sign into my work email account. Sometimes I forget to sign into my work email, but I usually remember.
It doesn’t matter if I’ve been emailed a new project to start working on or not b/c I never immediately begin working on it. I check my blog, I check my gmail, I check Tumblr, I check Facebook, I check Twitter and then I go through all the blogs I follow on google reader. Then I update Twitter, respond to people on Facebook or write “happy birthday” on their wall if it’s, ya know, their birthday, and then I sign in to gchat. Once on gchat I say hey to all my friends who are online and we talk about what we did on the previous night and what we’re doing today and tonight and for the rest of the week. We share cool/funny website links we’ve found earlier that day, talk about how work pretty much blows, and then it’s almost like a mutual understanding that now… it is time… that we actually got some work done and pause our chat for a while. Sometimes we’ll have meetings to go to or lunch will interrupt our conversation.
Instead of getting down to business this is usually when I write my Project Grace of the day. Then I check google reader again. Then I see if anyone has responded to me via Twitter or Facebook.
Then I get bored. Working on work is of course always an option but I get even more bored thinking about it so I usually try to remember what I had meant to blog about for the day. At night when I’m in bed before I fall asleep, hundreds of thoughts stream through my head and I always mean to write them down b/c they are great blogging topics. I usually don’t write them down though; instead I waste away time at work trying to recall what I was thinking about the night before while in my half awake half asleep state.
Distractions were not on my mind last night; however it occured to me today that without all these freagin distractions… I might actually be a decent little worker Bee. What if Honey Bees had internet and blogged and Twittered and stuff? Would be have as much honey as we currently do? Would some Honey Bees rebel and buzz, “I’m too special and creative for this honey making bullshit! I hate collecting nectar and pollen from flowers! I have so much more to offer than this! I just wanna be free to fly and buzz around wherever I want! I quit!” ??? If you followed a Honey Bee on Twitter would they have updates like, “Just gathered a bunch of pollen and nectar from a rosemary plant. On my way back to the hive to deliver the goods and then I’m off to do it all over again. FML.” or, “Today the queen had a worker bee come and tell me that if I don’t start collecting my fair share of nectar and pollen I’ll be kicked out of the colony. The worker bee was my mom. FML.” ??
How much has the Internet really helped productivity?
