Electronic OCD... sometimes, most of the times, all the time...

Do you get caught in the Electronic "OCD Loop?" 

This is something interesting. I got this from a former colleague. Didn't think there would be such a thing like this but somehow, it does have some truth to this. I would sometimes find myself subconsciously doing this; falling into this trap, as I would call it. 

Here's what would happen: I would just launch the browser and open specific websites i.e. Gmail, ATP tennis sometimes, when I really need to look for some info i.e. some codes snippets or google on forums for info; I would end up opening some sites time and again without knowing it. 

Sad but true… 

"Do you sit there and hit the send and receive for your email inbox repeatedly, anxiously waiting and looking for "something"... not sure what but "something"?

 

 Do you find yourself automatically going to a website, even though you 

 were just there 5 minutes ago and nothing possibly could have changed 

 yet?

 

Do you stop what you are doing everytime the phone rings, even though we know it will take us 20 minutes just to get back into the grove of where we just were... destroying all our momentum.

 

-> free moment -> run to the computer -> check email -> check websites -> ...

<- repeat ...<-

 

Analyze your tendency for falling into this trap, and start thinking of ways to snap out of it when you feel yourself getting sucked into this loop, because it can waste a LOT of your time. How often do you actually allow yourself to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring results?

 

The electronic OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many of us in the current informational society where we exhibit a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that we are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, even if they make no sense. If you were paying a person by the hour and you saw them doing those activities, you would fire them... or re-educate them fast.

 

STOP THE MADNESS

 

If at the end of the day you feel exhausted, stressed out and anxious because you know you were busy but are not sure what you have to show for it... then maybe it is time to do things different.

 

Aside of simply being aware of this trap, at least three times per day at scheduled times, you can yourself these two questions...

 

1. Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

2. If I were paying someone to do what I am doing right now, would I feel good that the money is being well spent?

 

Although today's technology is great, we are becoming attached at the hip to these things and not giving the proper attention to getting things done. Success is based on massive action (output). And increased output most often necessitates decreased input."

my facebook... one

I just got hooked into this facebook hoopla... I used to keep a friendster account, but lately they have been having connection problems and outages that somehow made their site inaccessible. It started when my wife created a facebook account after her friend's proding and that "It" being a more "sosyal" (loosely means, high class in Filipino) networking site.

I have heard and read a lot about facebook but never rode the band wagon till now, it turned to be something much cooler than I thought. It has a whole lot of things to keep your network interested and hooked. It also able to keep track of the updates within your network too; or so I at least think so, with all the updates posted on "the Wall"... What I find "kewl" about this is that, I am able to mesh together my other web thingy's i.e. pictures at picasa, blogs from blogger, micro-blogs from twitter (which I have been able to integrate as facebook updates)... so all in all, I am able to keep these different items and view them from my facebook.

As now, I have been able to integrate:

-pictures from picasaweb 

-blogs posting from blogger 

-tweets from twitter 

Integrating pictures from picasa was simple enough since there is this "Application" called [xxxx] that grabs the images from picasa and shows them in facebook. All I need to do was add the application into my facebook, then login my picasa account; then.. there you go, you got all the pictures that you have posted in picasa shown on your facebook.

The same goes for the blogs. I know I can write blogs on facebook but my blogger account came in first & I kinda liked the way my blogs are set up at blogger as they are now, so I'm keeping 'em that way. So it follows the same process, added an application [xxx] to read blogs from blogger; then configured my blogger account, then there I go... my blogger account can not be seen on facebook. the cool thing is I can also select which post can be seen on facebook whilst, at blogger... it shows all.

Then I got this Twitter... this is way kewl... Twitter has been gaining a lot of steam lately and I also got into it. Not because of wanting to have a Twitter but out of neccesity. Twitter is something the is what they call "Micro-blogging": "Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

"Tweeting" has come handy to me since I am not able to write lengthy blogs, due to time constraints... I know, I know... it's a lame excuse, but it's the truth. As much as I would love to be able to write (an illusion, that I can be a writer!!!!), the truth is, time just illudes me. Sigh... TIME has become a luxury to me these days (it's another story...) Anyways, with Twitter; I am able to Tweet every once in a while. So, I am tweeting from time to time so-to-speak. The flip side of this is that, no one knows that I am tweeting so this is another challenge. (it's another story :-) )