When the songbird sings

I’ve got to agree with Signal vs. Noise’s Jason that people need their “alone time” in order to be productive. It’s when people get “in the zone”, uninterrupted, that they are more productive.

The way I see it, interruption is being mistaken for collaboration. The are drastically different things. Interruption is productivity’s biggest enemy. It sounds counterintuitive to many, but we should be working harder on staying apart and less on getting in touch too much. A healthy dose of physical and virtual distance is a good thing. If we want to be highly productive we need more alone time.

Being productive isn’t something that just happens. You don’t just sit down and be productive. Real productivity takes time. It’s a process. You make your way into it. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes or a half hour or an hour or more to really get in that zone. And when you’re in that zone you are actually getting real work done. But once you get knocked out of that zone it takes a real toll on you. You go from highly productive to annoyed. And all these new methods of interruption, and the ability of anyone to find you any time, well, I think they’re just making it easier to indirectly annoy people. I don’t have research to back this up, it’s just a gut feeling.

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The past few days have been a wee bit humming. I’d “met” with Jane and Jay-Jay on few occasions, with each meeting culminating over our favorite Starbucks brews and pastries. I highly recommend honey-glazed doughnuts smothered with honey. It’s almost always enough to make my day.

I attended Tina’s wedding last Saturday. She was one of my best buddies in college and we used to spend hours at each other’s dorm rooms talking about boys, real and imagined lovelives, favorite majors, GE subjects, the quiet but ideal UP life, environmental awareness projects with UPGL. Her wedding with longtime boyfriend, Godo, was nice. It was good to see Elige, Jan, Ciena and Menands again.

I was asked by one of my friends to help edit a book which is due to be out this year. The subject is close to my heart, and so I gamely accepted the assignment. Each information I read about it leads me to other acounts and heart-wrenching POVs. It’s great to be able to spend time at a coffee shop and just work, work, work without making you feel that you’re doing so as a job. I cannot let the cat out of the bag yet, but I’m crossing my fingers that I would be helping promote it soon. I’m so excited!

Gee, after a year, my SEO is finally working. I’m finally on the first page (top 10) of Google for one of the toughest key phrases. I’ve been on #1 on yahoo and #3 on MSN. Yay! My site actually landed on the respective first pages of the top 3 engines for related key phrases for many months now, but it was only recently that I got one of the first-page positions for the phrase that I had been working on. I was already losing heart, but the big 3 finally noticed. But then again, it could be Big Daddy’s fault.

Next stop: Image Search Engines. And then the Genesis Engine. Just speaking blogging in tongues for now.