The blog

Last week, I con­duct­ed an open course in per­son­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in Stock­holm, with par­tic­i­pants from a wide vari­ety of indus­tries: from dis­pos­al of radioac­tive waste to gar­den­ing, via phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (among others).

We talked about the advan­tages with shut­ting your office door from time to time, and about not check­ing your e‑mail con­stant­ly, when you real­ly need to focus on a dif­fi­cult task.

At 1:17 PM the day after, I got a nice mail from one of the participants:

Hi David!

I have pro­mot­ed your course here at work! It was great and very interesting.
Just now, I opened Out­look. I had it shut down this morn­ing between 10 and 12 AM and I closed my door.

I got so much done!

Isn’t it fas­ci­nat­ing that such small mea­sures as clos­ing a door and shut­ting down an e‑mail pro­gram for a while may cre­ate such a sub­stan­tial effect?