The Inefficiency of Being Too Curious
May 26th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
Email this article to a friend
One time leak I noticed I had was checking up on certain things too often. I’ve already gotten my email processing down to only once a day, but I found I was still checking up on things like blog comments, feeds, ad revenue, sales through my games site, web traffic, watchlists, and other stats several times per day at random intervals.
On the one hand, it’s great to have up-to-the-minute information available, but taking in that ever-changing information can become a time drain if done to excess. Some days I feel as if I’m infected by the curiosity bug, always wanting to know the very latest information for no particular reason. I’d catch myself unconsciously checking up on various information outlets far more frequently than I needed to. Perhaps this is a strange form of perfectionism.
I opted to consciously determine how often I really need to check up on these ever-changing pieces of data. Much of the information is important, and it would be best if I reviewed most of it daily. But just because this data is updated in real-time doesn’t mean I have to maintain a real-time brain-feed.
I figured that for comments people post on this blog, it’s reasonable for me to check those twice a day. Email is still good at once a day; I only check email at the end of my workday, since I’ve found it to be too distracting to check it earlier in the day. I can check on sales and ad revenue twice a day, since I can do both of those in less than a minute, and if something is broken, I want the chance to detect and fix it early. But for all my other stats, once at the end of each day is fine, and some things I only need to check once a week.
I find that working on my most important tasks early in the day and leaving most of the routine stats checking until later in the day is more productive. While I might miss the chance to react early to some important piece of data by a few hours, it’s rare that happens, and the time savings outweighs that opportunity.
Just 10 minutes every weekday wasted on unnecessary stats checking adds up to a full-time workweek every year. No wonder I didn’t have time for a vacation last year…. 
Of course, if I simply intend to make this change, I’ll be good for a few days and then forget about it and slip back into old habits. So first, I’m going to use a behavioral conditioning technique to put the behavior on cue, in this case tying it to a particular time of day. For stats checking I do once a day, that will be done at the end of my workday after I’ve done everything else. So if I check those stats any earlier, I know without a doubt I’ve goofed. My workday ends at 5pm most days, so that will happen in the 4-5pm range. For anything I do twice a day, the first check will be done right after I’ve completed four hours of writing my book, which will put it into the 11a-12p range, just before lunch. Putting these behaviors on cue helps me establish my new habit by binding it to specific times of day.
Secondly, I’m turning this into a 30-day challenge for myself, so I’m committed to sticking with it for 30 days to see how it works.
I’m sure many other people have routine tasks they perform far more often than necessary, but perhaps the tasks are still important and can’t be eliminated entirely. Try binding those actions to certain times or day or before or after once-a-day activities like meals, and keep it up for at least three weeks. This will break the old habit and establish the new one.
May 26th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
Its my personal opinion that checking things too often is a direct result of not knowing exactly what you need to be doing with this time period.
You see I have work, school and my own project. I wake up a 6:30 work on the project from 7:00 to 9:30 and then I have school, work and other obligations. I always get in another half hour of work, at least, on my project at another time throughout the day, however because my schedule isn’t fixed I don’t decide exactly when to do it.
This is the problem. For some days I don’t get much chance to even sit down, however for others I have periods of time when I am sitting at my computer and I haven’t specifically allotted this time for work. So what do I do? Check e-mail, blogs, forums, ect. various times because I am procrastinating working or doing something more productive.
I think the key to stopping it is to ensure that I always have some sort of scheduled time for almost my entire day of what I do within those periods. Then if I can’t do those things because work or other things would override it, then I can shift the schedule. However, my current status of just leaving time periods blank because I’m not sure I can work on my project then has left huge inefficiencies.
Hopefully I’ll work out a good system to both keep me informed and up to date while remaining productive and efficient. Excellent post!
May 26th, 2005 at 8:06 pm
Steve, I’m faced with the same situation. Your article shed some light on my search of solutions. Thank you!
May 27th, 2005 at 12:36 am
[...] тной Варваре нос оторвали
Steve Pavlina сегодня опять зажигает: One time leak I noticed I had was [...]
May 27th, 2005 at 8:29 am
Inefficient perhaps, but I think it’s just a natural result of the way we evolved. People were not meant to sit down in a chair for 10 hours a day staring at a computer monitor. We’re (well, many of us) are interested in what else is out there beyond the narrow view of life we experience.
So we look.
I’m in a constant struggle with this. Some people say we do other things not focused on the goal (read: procrastinate) because we’re afraid we can’t finish. I don’t know if it’s that easy. To some extent, acheiving the goal is pointless from a survival standpoint (and often from an intellectual one too, if you dig deeply enough). Once you’ve reached mating age, have a roof over your head, and food in your tummy, nature pretty much doesn’t care after that.
I often question our drive to buck nature and turn ourselves into these ultra efficient machines for the sake of a dollar. Do we want to be people or robots?
May 27th, 2005 at 9:06 am
Just an idea. I have the curiousity bug as well and I have too many RSS feeds in my bloglines.com account. My first solution (today was the first day) was to remove the “bloglines” button from my link on the toolbar of my browser. So far so good but it’s only been one day.
If that doesn’t work, my second plan is to edit my \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file with a bloglines 0.0.0.0 so that I just can’t access it at all. (I might have to tell IE that bloglines shouldn’t go through the proxy)
Reading your article, it occured to me that I could adpot something like your plan by adding a scheduled script that say at 7pm that updates the hosts file (and or other settings) to allow me to access that sight only after 7pm. Seems like an interesting idea (and yet another waste of time writing that script :-p)
May 27th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
i think we need to focus on self-control. I think removing bloglines button is a good idea but now you are spending wasted hours scripting to block a particular site. i procrastinate and am not ultra efficient but we all need to work on maintaining ourselves. i will agree with the counter argument, that it is easier without the distrations. just thoughts…