Deal with information that grabs your attention

Habits can be difficult to maintain and there's a ton of stuff that contributes to the difficulty. Deal with these things and your efforts to build an efficient habit has a good chance of succeeding. Here's what you want to achieve:

• throw away magazines
• turn off the telephone
• log out of your email program
• shut down your web browser
• your habit of checking your email makes you think about checking your email so check email less often
• your habit of checking your favorite sites makes you think about checking your favorite sites so check your favorite web sites less often

How do you reach these goals? A couple of suggestions:

• put magazines in one box/ drawer/ pile
• finish each working hour by shutting down the computer, go out and get a whiff of fresh air and remind yourself of one thing that makes your life great right now
• save your bookmarks in a file, hide the file in some obscure folder on your computer and delete all bookmarks from your browser
• save your rss feeds in a file, hide the file in some obscure folder on your computer and delete all feeds from your newsreader and uninstall your newsreader
• turn off email alerts
• put away posters, images and graphics that triggers your imagination, anything that triggers thoughts really
• one night each week, go to bed an hour early