Lately, I have become convinced that multitasking is the enemy of qualitative productivity. Sometimes quality results from working on a bazillion things at once but generally a lot of potential for greatness gets lost in the maelstrom. Most of the time, you produce a variety of material that is middling in quality with maybe one or two better constructs. And you can only hide in meeting rooms and work from home so much. The most compelling article in support of the nascent unitasking movement was published in the Atlantic Monthly a while back. If I don’t remember writing about it here before, and I’m really not sure if I did, it’s because of this simple little idea.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic
level, the mental balancing acts that it requires–the constant
switching and pivoting–energize regions of the brain that specialize in
visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear
to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning.
We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever
it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

Anyway, this brings me to a new application for the Mac OS X called “Freedom”; Lifehacker alerted me to its existence a couple of days back. Perhaps best of all, “Freedom” doesn’t allow you to just turn it off when you start jonesing for the ‘net. Here’s the scoop, straight from the Freedom “read me.”

Stopping or quitting Freedom will not re-enable your network adapters.
This is purposeful. To re-enable your network before the time period
elapses, you must restart your computer.

Download it here and get big chunks of your life back.

Turman