Over the last few months, people have begun asking me: “How do you do so much? How do you keep up with it all?”

Now, I don’t think I do as much as some of you think I do. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anywhere near the things I should have lately, so I began thinking about those questions.

I do a lot of thinking. I like it. It’s one of my favourite things and I like to think that I’m good at it.

But where do thoughts come from?

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a blathering of random metaphysical esoterica. What I mean is: ‘Why do I have these thoughts?

On thoughts

The answer is that thoughts stem from various external stimuli. From the conversations I have with the smart and talented people I’m honoured to call my friends and colleagues; from the blogs I read (also written by smart and talented folks, as far as I can tell); from the emails I receive: personal, business and mailing lists. From all these places and more, my thoughts spring. They tumble together in little parcels of disjointed meaning, scattered threads of random thought that bounce against each other constantly and gradually weave into cogency or are discarded.

On distractions

I’ve written before that I don’t enjoy the quiet stillness inside my mind, but that’s untrue. I have plenty of other reasons to dislike being alone with my thoughts, which are neither quiet nor still.

I don’t own a portable music-player of any description, because I tell myself that would be a distraction, that my brain needs a rest from incessant stimulation. The result is, of course, that I check Twitter from my N95 approximately forty times on my forty-five minute trip to work.

It’s odd that music, which aids me in so many facets of my life, can distract me so thoroughly from the rush and scurry in my brain. Or perhaps that is precisely the point. Music abstracts me from the current flow, insulates me, and allows me to achieve particular tasks with a stronger focus than if it were absent. Without those tasks, it just distracts me.

On escapism

None of this is likely to come as a surprise to you. We all need to get away, to take a time out, a little pause to regain our breath and our focus. Therein lies the problem for me.

Why do I need to watch yet another episode of the West Wing today? Or check my email, my feeds, Twitter, Flickr, again? Why do I need to take a book on RESTful Web Services to bed at night? For that matter, why do I stay up beyond all sensible hours until I’m so exhausted that my right eye starts literally twitching? Even now I’m listening to Ten (only the best album ever) and pausing periodically in my progress with this article to lose myself in the songs.

Where is the focus in that?

In which our intrepid hero takes action

The problem here does not lie with things like checking my email or my feeds. It doesn’t come from the external stimuli. It comes from when they are applied.

What’s the first thing you do every morning? Me, I open 4 tabs in my browser: Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter replies, and Flickr recent activity. While I wait for those to load, I switch to Mail to confirm I haven’t received any work-related email overnight.

Next, I “process” all the information on those pages and that sets me up for a good long day of reacting.

Fuck reacting. Act!

Over lunch one day, one of the founders of Atlassian, Scott Farquhar, said that he had recently been trialling not opening his email until midday each day. I tried it. I think I lasted about three days.

Now I’m going to do it again. And the same goes for my feeds, Flickr et al.

But wait, there’s more!

I’m also unsubscribing from all those feeds that I’m only following because I feel I should ‘keep in the loop’, and from all the mailing lists whose communities I don’t actively participate in.

I already vigorously prune my feeds and my contacts on social networking sites I use regularly.

A challenge

I have a challenge for you. It’s also for myself. Let’s see if we can’t do it together.

I have cut all these distractions from my life. I will cut more. I will carve away every input that does not lead to action. I will push the reactive part of my day back until after lunchtime.

I’m going to start putting my thoughts to work. All those bundles of meaning have been assembled into functional parts that need structure. They need a coherent whole and I can only provide it by taking action.

I’d like to see you do it too. Maybe some of you were already on the ball with this one, but I think we probably all need a little push and a lot of pruning on occasion.

Get to it. Drop the distractions. Take actions instead.

I want people to ask you: “how do you do so much?”

This has been a long time coming. I’ve always followed the conversation. I read every site. I scoured the web for content as an increasingly voracious consumer. I stuffed more and more of everything into my brain and I couldn’t get enough.

Then I got the agency job. One that had me slaving 14-18 hours most days to produce slick high-quality standards-compliant accessible websites, usually for government departments. I never installed a feed reader on my new machine. I never had time.

Work was my life until Web Essentials in 2005. Everybody there was talking about Flickr, telling me it was a revolution. A new kind of application. A new form of online community. A new paradigm!

I scoffed at them like any other sensible person does when faced with such fervent reverence. But, after the conference, I looked at the photos and I wanted to comment… Trapped! Once I had an account, it seemed almost churlish not to post at least one photo. This started a long term obsession with photography, mostly self-involved.

More importantly, it started an attitude of experimentation, a willingness to sign up for any and every app that comes along. To subscribe to every feed, for at least a little while. It also meant that, after a while, I was actually giving back. Producing content and contributing in some small measure to both sides of the signal/noise ratio.

And then there was Twitter…

I’ve been writing small blips of bollocks there since October sometime (actually it was 10:53 AM October 27, 2006). And, for some reason, I can’t stop.

I love putting ideas out there. I love discussion and interaction. I love sharing my thoughts, then watching my thoughts and your thoughts grow and commingle.

In 2005, Molly Holzschlag told me I needed a blog, so I asked her what I should write. Being the woman she is, Molly said: “Everything!” Since that time, others have suggested it occasionally and I’ve always asked the same question. Their answers vary dramatically and that was my excuse for not building this site. I never knew what I would write about, and I still don’t. But I am going to write.

My hand has been forced by one of my favourite evil geniuses, Andrew Krespanis. The sneaky bugger slaved away for weeks to give me LachStock as a gift. Aided and abetted by a secret squirrel pact, he left me totally overwhelmed.

I still don’t know how to say thank you for that gift. I’m not even sure that is possible. The only appropriate response is to do this, and do it right. So, after 6 years of living, breathing and talking web, I’m finally making some web of my own. I’m joining the conversation I’ve followed for so long. I don’t know what I’ll be writing or where it will take us, but, fuck, I reckon it’ll be fun!