Jamie Fehr

That’s what I am, distracted. I am sure every one of you has at some point in your life felt that there were just too many things to do, and yet for some reason you tried to complete every one of them. That’s where I’m at right now, and it’s foolishness, it’s time to make some changes.

There is a song called Little Acorns by The White Stripes on their album Elephant and this song is about how we need to be like the squirrel. The squirrel achieves the seemingly insurmountable task of gathering a winters supply of food one nut at a time. So here is a handful of nuts that need reckoning with.

Nut #1: This Website

I love writing for this website, but we all know that good writing takes time. I am a missionary and as result I need to maintain a balance of communicating with people are entrusting me with their ministry dollars. There has not been one new believer in the world, to my knowledge, as a direct or indirect result of this website. Therefore it is not a priority. I once had plans to expand my online presence, but now I feel that a more appropriate course of action is to decrease, so from this time forward I am limiting myself to one(1) update a week, that is unless an emergency announcement comes up, then I will allow myself one paragraph to explain what’s going on.

A web programming hero of mine, David Heinemeier Hansson, has repeatedly said that beauty is in constraints. That true creativity comes from limiting yourself to realistic amounts of time and resources and still doing it well. I believe that to be the truth and am excited to see how this plays out.

Nut #2: The Online Photos

I can already hear your protests: Nooooo! not the online photos! Those are the best thing you’ve got going on! Don’t worry they are not going to disappear. It’s just that I have spent an awful lot of time trying to sort my library and when it’s all said and done a well sorted library really isn’t going to get huge amounts recognition, so the photos will keep coming in the same disarray as before. The sorting has been relegated to a non-issue.

Nut #3: IM and Skype

These communication life savers sure can be a waste of time. It’s so easy to make meaningless communication that I just do it whenever I feel like be distracted from work. I have decided to remain offline more and revert to good old fashion un-intrusive email. It’s worked for sending messages for years and will continue to be effective for years to come.

Nut #4: RSS

This is probably the biggest nut in the basket and I am really going to have a hard time cracking it (bad pun fully intended). According to recent surveys on the web only about 8% of people actually use RSS. So if you don’t know what I am talking about and how it distracts me, here is the skinny, pretty much every site on the internet these days has an RSS feed, and I have an RSS reader, so whenever a website updates it’s content, my computer knows about it and tells me. It’s a bit like having every site email you with every change they make and as a result there is a lot of updates to sort through to find the updates that I really want to read.

What I am going to do is limit myself to only 20 minutes of RSS related web browsing a day and whatever doesn’t get read will be removed from my RSS inbox, along with deleting a lot sites that I don’t find regularly interesting.

And with all that spare time I might actually be to enjoy myself working on projects and relating with the locals. What a grand era I’m entering.

Update: I wrote this a week ago, and when I was done I thought it might be a lot more like the new me to not publish it. So now after a week of following my own advice I see that it is working and things are getting done.