Downside Of Being Available 24/7

January 7, 2010

Interview with Timothy Ferriss, author of the book The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content.

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Mike Carruthers:
We are so available to other people with cell phones and all the other technology that we don’t have a lot of uninterrupted time to focus on the task at hand.

Timothy Ferriss:
One of the biggest sources of stress (and this is measurable) is self-interruption and interruption. Looking at some of the internal audits at Morgan Stanley people are often interrupted on average every three minutes.

Timothy Ferriss

Timothy Ferriss, author of the book The 4-Hour Workweek. says so many of our interruptions are self-interruptions and it’s getting worse.

When people realize that if they’re checking email every thirty minutes, that problem’s going to get worse, not better. So it’s going to become every twenty and then every ten and then every five then every minute and that’s just an unsustainable practice. The question isn’t if you’re going to change your behavior the question is when.

And Timothy has some suggestions to help.

Like rescuetime.com. It’s a program you can download for free and it will tell you where you’re spending and wasting time online and on your computer. And so then you can block out certain periods of time where you can’t access certain things like email or Facebook for example.

To hear the complete, unedited interview, click here.