WEP '12, Day 73 - Time Management II, The Cycle of Sloth

Something I've noticed as I've carried out the time logs I mentioned last week is that my time expenditure seems to be cyclical.  And borderline obsessive, for that matter.  It's not the one and done time expenditures like the webcomics (10 minutes today) or a run through the blogosphere (23 minutes) that really consumes my time.  It's the things I do over and over that really wastes minutes.

For example, today my email inbox was unusually full, and I had to type out a couple of responses.   That took 34 minutes.  Then I browsed my selected forums over at Something Awful.  There wasn't much going on, so that was only 3 minutes.  I took care of some one-and-dones, including Dominions 3 and my webcomics and blogs run, then checked my email again.  There was something else there to take care of and that was another 16 minutes.  Then I hit Something Awful for another couple of minutes.  Then I browsed past the War of the Clans site and there was something going on there, and that was 26 minutes.  So then I looked at my email another time, and that was another 15 minutes.  At long last my inbox was empty again, there was no new posts at WotC or SA, and I finally was able to get down to the business of writing this post.

What's more, even as I write this, I have to force myself not to glance at my email...damn, there's another email there.  Going to have to ignore it for now.  I get a little twitchy, though.  I want to head over to SA to see if anything new's popped up, but dammit, I'm busy.

So what's there to do about all this?  We'll I've been trying the gradual weaning process.  I've declared more and more things to be spam.  I've reduced the number of SA forums I'm tracking from sixteen to five.  I'm playing fewer Dominions 3 games.  I'm also trying to get more sleep.  They say that you have more willpower available to spend if you're well rested.  That's why Interrogation 101 involves disrupting the target's sleep cycle.

But it's still a struggle.

One solution would be to try and go cold turkey.  Except that I need a lot of that stuff.  Email is how I coordinate much of my life, for example.  Facebook and Twitter are potential markets to sell to, as are the Something Awful forums, actually.  Maybe I'm just rationalizing...that's always a danger...but it seems I've cut down quite a bit already.

Maybe I just need to go to bed earlier?