Roy Tang

For all of my working life I’ve gotten used to sitting at a workstation where I do not have regular internet access. So while I’ve often read a lot of those articles about how to maintain focus, I’ve never actually realized how difficult it was until I brought home a bunch of work-related reading material to catch up on. Yes, I tried to read boring work-related stuff on an internet-enabled machine. Wonder how much progress I managed?

I woke up around 8:00 AM. The plan was to review a set of documents and plan ahead the work for the coming week. It shouldn’t have taken me more than two hours. By 5 PM, I had accomplished the following:

• seen the latest episodes of Big Bang Theory, Scrubs, Smallville and Boston Legal
• chatted with various people online about Magic: The Gathering and Forbidden Kingdom (no spoilers, haven’t watched it yet!) and random other junk
• played around an hour of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
• made various posts on online forums
• cleaned up my desktop
• taken 2 baths (it was hot!)

And yes, I finally managed to finish what I had to do. I had a rough outline of work to do over the next few days. It was a bit less than I had expected to actually accomplish over the whole day, but it was the bare minimum I wanted to finish.

This is a sad testament to what I would expect if I ever became a freelancer who worked from home. I need to be able to summon necessary focus on things that need to be done before I could even consider such a working path. Otherwise I would end up goofing off some 70% of the day.