Addiction challenge: some changes

No, no.. I’m not backing out! It’s actually going pretty well and my productivity is significantly higher. I just realized over the last two days that I had forgotten a couple of things when I laid out my addiction-cracking plan.

First of all, I neglected to take build time into account. Any programmer out there knows what I’m talking about: you’re working on a piece of code, make a few changes, end up changing a header file, and then you have to compile the app to test the changes. It doesn’t matter what kind of monster machine you’re working on, compile/build time is time consuming and tedious. As a result, you tend to pass that time reading articles, browsing forums, doing whatever-and of course each of those has the tendency to run over the build time and eat into your overall productivity.

The other thing I forgot was another of my internet addiction elements: Podcasts! For the uninitiated, podcasts are basically episodic media streams. A user subscribes to a podcast, and depending on the software they are using, will automatically receive the newest updates in the form of audio and video files. Now I have a couple of game related casts that I subscribe to, as well as Slashdot Review and the Happy Tree Friends podcast. While downloading them is not a problem, watching/listening to them takes time, but since I enjoy them so much I really don’t want to cut them out.

I have thought about these two ‘issues’ and have come up with additions/modifications to my final and Friday goals.

Friday goals

-In addition to being able to check RSS streams when I get to work and at lunch, I may check them while building/compiling. I may not click on links from them at these times.

-I may refresh my podcasts in the morning when I get in, to give them time to download, but I may only watch short (less than 1 minute) video casts when they complete, others must either be watched/listened to at lunch or at home (by copying them onto my PSP).

Final goals

-In addition to being able to check RSS streams when I get to work and at lunch, I may check them while building/compiling. I may not click on links from them at these times.

-I may refresh my podcasts in the morning when I get in, to give them time to download, but I may only watch/listen to them at lunch or at home (by copying them onto my PSP).