[chrisbolin]

y'all have been very kind. the productivity tips are very helpful. here's my system:

- sit down at my desk with laptop and phone

- disable wifi on my laptop

- turn my phone face-down on the desk, muted, with wifi/data still on

This lets me check if I have any new messages via my phone, but it is a polling system vs an interrupt system. I have to opt in to check. And I am very aware that using my phone looks and feels less productive, so I try to avoid using it too long.

I've been able to be pretty productive (as an software engineer) with this system. I find that I have to reconnect on my laptop about every 30 minutes to do something or another. Of course, every day varies.

[nicklaf]

This is a very interesting idea. I do like the strategy of separating connectivity along the boundary of phone and workstation, and with the phone face down / muted to create space for yourself.

As for having to connect your workstation now and then, I can't help but think we all ought to be running parallel, sandboxed VMs, and then importing resources like internet connectivity from the connected VM, but with limited scope. (Who would have thought that something like Plan 9 could have also implemented these kind of productivity hacks, along with all of its other superior approaches to things....)