Productivity

There is a movement of efficiency online and in ones life. Some examples are the zen habits blog, the lifehacker blog, and Getting Things Done system. These are philosophies that make a lot of sense and i have tried to implement in my own life.

I have integrated with google products in an effort to be more effective at getting things done.
Gmail pulls mail from all my email accounts into a central account, saving time checking email.
I have a comprehensive to-do list on google tasks.
I have all events and appointments carefully organized and planned out on google calendar.
Google voice takes all my calls and transcribes voicemails which are then sent to my email.
All my documents are immediately accessible on google docs and tagged for easy searching.
Everything syncs to my iphone which i always carry.
Everything is instantly accessible from my igoogle page.

This system does help with staying organized and getting things done. I am not planning any departure from my setup anytime soon. However, after using most of these tools for a few years i am noticing some unfortunate side effects. In the time i spend setting up everything, adding events to the calendar, task list, and on igoogle i could actually be getting things that needed done worked on. Having easy links to all my favorite news sources is a terrible distraction and combined with severe ADD (i would estimate that i have about a 40 second attention span) it is incredibly easy to waste hours upon hours reading random articles on blogs or reddit. For example, it has taken me more than five hours to write this, i've been working on it regularly and i'm not even finished yet. I shouldn't even be writing this, i should be doing homework, but for some reason writing makes me feel productive.

I write down most to-dos with google tasks but the problem is actually doing them. another problem with writing everything that needs remembered down is then not much effort is put into remembering those things. I don't remember most of the students names in my classes, and i know many of them. I cant recall the names of any of my professors either, but i can look them up if i need to.

My system is far from perfect, and even if you have the best system in the world, getting things done only gets so easy, and for the most part things are not easy, and sometimes require herculean effort.

And maybe its just me.