the corner office

I've become increasingly unhappy about my productivity during my spare time, and especially how it's affected by the Internet.

People who know me might chuckle, because there have certainly been stretches of my life which have been completely caught up online. That isn't as much the case these days, though. I'm not much into social media, blogs and the like are a much smaller part of my life than they once were. And over the years, I've studied, I have projects, I do things.

Instead, it's a feeling, knowing that no matter what I've gotten done over the past week, or month, or year, I could've accomplished more. It's still all too easy to get caught up reading the news, random stuff on the web, one site to the next, half an hour lost from an innocuous web search, opening up a browser on my phone on the train instead of reading something more interesting, losing the occasional evening to YouTube.

Frustration builds, and then all you need is a nudge. For me, the nudge was coming across Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism, which is really the reason for this post. Having set the scene, review to follow.