Etiqueta: personal productivity

Wow, great new feature from Google! You can now enable desktop notifications even using the web browser! That will help you 100 times more to be… interrupted! That’s a bad thing!

If you use GTalk embedded in a browser window as I like to use, here’s a tip to avoid enabling these desktop notifications.

I keep one of my browser windows on top of all others, so I can see it’s title bar, no matter what application I’m using besides the browser. When someone starts to chat with me, the title changes, and it kind of interrupt me, but gives me some seconds to finish up what I’m doing and then I can give the right attention to the chat window. Or defer the talk to the end of my working cycle.

Notifications for emails… no, you don’t want that. You drive your life, not emails. Build a way to make sure you are not every 5mins checking for new messages and cleaning up your inbox.

So, if I can give some tips, here they are:

• Avoid desktop notifications. Check every desktop notification you have and verify if that one is really important. If not, disable it! But hey, if you work on some mission critical support team… leave that notification active ok?! 🙂
• Make sure you have a routine to avoid checking emails every 5mins. If something is really important, teach people to call you. Or to ping you by instant messaging, SMS, os some other option that is really going to interrupt you, but for a good reason. If people call you and it’s not that urgent, also tell them they can use emails, and then you can answer back with more time. Actually, in your time.