A while back I wrote about using full screen to enhance your productivity and focus on the task you need to accomplish. But that is not enough - you need to get rid of blinking, screaming and beeping everything. Here are a few recipes that I follow personally.

Most likely you use Outlook as I do. Outlook has incredible concentration killer - Desktop Alter. I would not say you should disable it, I would say you must disable it! Here is how my notification settings look like

That's right, I do not get any notifications. I want to decide when to read process e-mail myself. I'll talk later about processing e-mail.

Next thing is IMs. Now, don't get me wrong instant messaging is really great. You can distract people from what they are doing all over the world (and, yes, you can use messengers to communicate). Usually IM tools are smart enough to have a "Do not disturb" mode. In this mode all inbound communication will just accumulate without letting you know and you will be able to process it later. And to not forget to turn of sound notification on incoming messages.

There are so many ways to get distracted, but there equally as many to protect yourself from distraction. Before you skip to the next web page check out this.

I just could not resist posting this godsend from Merlin Mann:

You don't stop the journey just because one of the donkeys died.

Keep going.

You read blogs. I also read many (but for sure not as many as some of you). I'm sure you appreciate the effort author put into thinking out and writing the post. But do you also recognize and benefit from the effort he put into creating a visual appeal for his messages? You should. It is also part of what author has to say.

Now, if you use Google Reader as I do be sure to click tiny button on the right of the title which will get you to the post on author's site.

Read it the way author intended it to be. And then go back to star or share. I wish there is an option in Google Reader that would make post title link directly to author's site.

Check your blog reading habits.

Leo Babauta of Zenhabits describes an interesting concept of pigeonholes in interpersonal communication. My personal experience with this suggests that there is always a hassle that stops people from changing for better. Changing for worse usually happens gradually and unconsciously; and when it is conscious (I can not imagine that, but still) you do not care how others perceive you anyway. Changing for better is in most cases a conscious action and involves a great deal of thinking. Here perception of you by others is important.

Unfortunately, often the first reaction to change in you (or in other words you trying to change a pigeonhole) is suspicion. Why would he wonna do that? Is he going to fool us? And you really need to get through this. One of the better options to do that is to get an alignment of a person you trust. With her belief in your new personality and her support it would be easier to convince rest of the world that it is not about them being fooled, but about you becoming better.

Beware that when you want to move something from one pigeonhole to another you need to pick it up first.

I'm a huge fun of "Maximize it!" approach when it comes to use of computer screen real estate no matter how big the diagonal is. Initially it was because I could not stand wasting precious pixels. And now it has more to do with attention and concentration rather than anything else. The idea behind this is quite simple: your computer can multitask - you can not. Period. If you think you can multitask enter "why context switching is expensive?" and read whatever article happens to be referenced from the first page. (I was surprised by how often they refer to humans and not computer systems). And then return to the beginning of the paragraph.

When you are at your computer you want it to be one task - one window. No IMs, no blinking something, no "Oh! Here is Firefox, let's check what they say there on the news..." Nothing! Just you, the task you need to accomplish and a piece of software that helps you.

The best way to achieve that is

• Hide the Task bar. You do not want anything to blink at you.
• Switch to full-screen. You need nothing expect for text editor when you write something; e-mail program when you process you messages; spreadsheet when you put together budget for next quarter; etc.

Many programs do support real full screen mode. Web browsers do, Microsoft Visual Studio does, some Microsoft Office applications do. That's pretty good coverage and you should make use of it.

When you are trying to relax and watch a good movie can you enjoy it when your cell rings every 5 minutes? What do you do in such situation? Right, you switch off the phone. Productive work is the same - you can enjoy it when no one disturbs you.

Turn off distraction and let your brain work at full capacity.

Many years ago when I was at school I was serious about orienting. Once I even was 3rd in national championship. And the trainer always told us "Stability is a sign of mastery". No matter how fast you are on the training you've got to be able to repeat this result in real competitions throughout a season. Also you've got to be proficient with basics of the sport - you can not succeed without consistent results in long-distance racing. And no one in your team is going to take you seriously if you say "This will be my showtime" when your results record is like a wave of highs and deeps. When you are developing a software product you, first of all, run against your competitors on quality. And you will only be able to succeed if you can deliver consistent level of quality. Consistent external (perceivable by your users and customers) quality can only be achieved through stable internal (visible to your staff) quality. Of course, miracles sometimes happen and you can get a decent quality product without maintaining internal quality metrics. But you will never able to sustain this quality before you get internal processes and practices right. (By the way, if you think you've managed to do that, drop me a note -  I would love to know how it worked).

Jason Yip got a great quote on this from The Practice of Programming:

Consistency leads to better programs.  If formatting varies unpredictably, or a loop over an array runs uphill this time and downhill the next, or strings are copied with strcpy here and a for loop there, the variations make it harder to see what's really going on.  But if the same computation is done the same way every time it appears, any variation suggests a genuine difference, one worth noting.

Master your skill and deliver quality everyday even if no one notices that. And once you need to do your best you'll do that as you always do.

You can not imagine how easy it is to learn. If you want to every little piece that you read, see or hear can enrich and advance your bag of knowledge. You never know when you are going to use what you learn, but one day you will not regret that you born this baggage. This time it was this neat post by Seth Godin. Simple yet powerful message, but there was one word that really caught my eye: "Moleskine" .

Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway used the same notebooks and were all called Moleskine? I didn't.

It is really interesting that many of the sources referred to Moleskine as "legendary notebook". Some people argue that one should not buy Moleskines as they will not make him Hemingway or Van Gogh anyway and some no-name "set of sheets of paper put together" will do just fine. The important thing here is not that all those famous artists, writers and painters are great because of owning a Moleskine, which is apparently not true. The important thing is that there must be something to these Moleskines that made all those great people choose these notebooks and stick with them.

What you do is important not what you have. And if something can help you do better then it must be a good thing.

It has been a really long summer, winter, whatever blogging vacation for me. And I really feel sorry for that. The excuse for me is that I learnt a lot and will try to share my discoveries and observations with you from now on. In this New Year 2009 I want to wish you to enjoy your life no matter what and always have a dream that will inspire you and drive you to success.

Happy New Year!

... someone has to be using it. Guys from 37signals got it right:

It feels great to be done with something on the programming side and then feeling free to move on to the next thing. We all do that at times. But it’s not really real until our users are able to enjoy it.

Way too often more attention is paid to the process of creating something than to the actual value of the result for others. The truth is that value is realized not at the moment the product is created and the more so not in the process of creation. Value is realized when the product is delivered and used.

Declaration of Interdependence which is going (hopefully) to drive the way we manage projects puts essential focus on delivery of value:

We increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus

Like quality is everyone's business every day, so delivery of value should be.

Some days ago I watched David Heinemeier Hansson's presentation on creating a profitable startup where he suggests that is generally more effective to sell to businesses than individual customers. That was kind of a useful observation that I, not being very experienced in running businesses, took for granted. In several days I concerned myself with checking out latest article in Joel Spolsky's column in the Inc.com magazine. It happened to be How Hard Could it Be: A Real Cool Customer. It was like one of those not rare alignment of stars that make certain idea pop-up again and again.

In his article Joel gives great arguments on why you'd better sell to businesses and not to consumers:

Businesses will happily spend large sums of money on fixed costs, because those costs can be spread out across so many of their customers.

Also Joel discusses this with Jeff Atwood in stackoverflow podcast #5, which I listened to yesterday.

This line of coincidences made me think a little about this idea. Being myself a part of a business I see that businesses pay easier not because they have lots of money (well, not only), but also because often for businesses it is easier to evaluate the value of certain costs.  Businesses can see how "costs can be spread out across so many of their customers" and what they would have in return. Individuals usually do not go that far to do such kind of analysis and therefore their decisions to buy tend to be based on momentary considerations.