A while back I read Andrew’s’ post Fighting Addiction about spending too much time reading his feeds and working outside school hours and it has been nagging at my brain for a long time.
I don’t blog or read other blogs in school time I mostly do it from home. Same goes for most of the development of the school website; writing the html setting up blogs etc. I spend a lot of my free time in front of my mac, no one asked me to, but that is how my life has developed.
Some of it is spent on non educational things, I do a bit of web-development and even used to write simple shareware and freeware (ok that was educational).
For a while I though blogging might develop my career but that has not happened.So I have started paying attention to how much time this eats up and it is a lot. On a free day (weekend, holiday) I get up early, email, feeds, follow links, comment, follow links, write a post, check a few class blogs and try and comment, email again, write a post, check feeds and so on and so on. It is always interesting, but it is unproductive and pays no bills.

So I am starting to think this blogging is getting in the way of

1. Real life
2. Other parts of my computer-life I enjoy and occasionally makes a wee bit of money (Web-dev, not shareware)

So I’ve started to analyse what is taking up all the time, what can I give up to free up time for fun and profit. Time sucks:

• Reading email, reading email as my mailer beeps, looking for stuff I need to do in my inbox.
• Reading Feeds, following links (recursive), looking at my aggregator when growl tells me to.
• Blogging, writing posts, this take a really long time, especially posts where I think as I go, describing a process and look for a conclusion, linking things together.
• Going between several jobs in a random fashion, driven by mail’s beep and Vienna’s growl

I got to the stage where I was talking to Ewan the other day and I am thinking of stopping blogging, popped out of my mouth. Since them I’ve been mulling it over weighing up the pros and cons. Making a plan:

• Email Keeping your email inbox under control in the Saturday Guardian a very simplified version of Gtd, I’ve been reading about this at 43 folders for an age and Ewan has be going on about it for a while but it looks way to complex for my needs, but Oliver Burkeman‘s Guardian piece was simple enough to carry out:

  Before:
  
  After:
  

  I think I am off to a good start on this one, i’ve got 3 messages in my inbox and half a dozen in my ToDo folder after a week of testing this out.
  The other thing i am trying, is that if I have some computer work to do, I don’t open mail.app until I’ve done an hour.

• Reading blogs I am going to try a similar sort of simplification. Read my aggregator once a day, flag, mark as read ruthlessly, unsubscribe from a lot of major edu bloggers (mainly in the usa), I’ll pick up their interesting threads from more local friends. I get more out of practical teachers blogs than the theorists/keynoters (over simplification, but I don’t need evangelised). I’ve unsubscribed from a pile of news feeds as I read the paper every day and I am looking to cut down on the feeds I just skim.
• Blogging I’ve got so much out of blogging in the last couple of years I don’t want to stop, but it is probably the biggest problem. The posts that take the most time are ones sparked by other blogs, where I am thinking out-loud trying to make sense of things. I’ve realised that these posts litter my Hard Drive, but don’t usually make it to the blog (when they do they usually don’t make much sense). So I am going to stop writing those ones, I can think about them, but I don’t need to type or spell check them.
  Mainly I want to share what my class/ school are doing, hopefully gaining them an audience, document practice; test things out that might be useful; point to other interesting things on the net. So that is what I am going to blog about, short and hopefully sweet posts.

So I am set for a more effective, productive and diverse online life, I hope so.