[lysol]

There are salient points here, but they're masked by the caricature of a maniac who can't go without Facebook for five seconds and a mythical beast that never gives his brain a break from work. Real developers fit into some reasonable amount of both kinds of behavior and it's the balance that is important, and different for every developer.

Be smart and be true to yourself, not a watered down version of someone else's life philosophy.

[steve8918]

I agree. I don't like it when some random blogger talks with fake authority on an issue and boils it down to some black-and-white binary comparison.

That being said, one thing I realized last week is that I distract myself way too much while I'm supposed to be working. Starting tomorrow (I don't plan on working today), I'm closing my e-mail, IM, Facebook, Words with Friends and stock charts and hope that increases my overall productivity, which has been extremely, extremely poor over the last 6 weeks.

[indubitably]

> Starting tomorrow

No you're not. I mean, come on. This guy is advocating an asocial lifestyle. We live in our computational environments, and we need constant contact with the world outside that environment, even though we're _using_ that environment to make the contact.

We're human beings, not machines.

[jgeerts]

That's what I thought too, not talking to your co-workers is a bridge too far and the consequence for doing the meditation is that everybody in your company will know you. But there is a lot of truth to what he is saying and I often find myself in the distraction loop he is describing. If you plan out your day more structured you will get more result, I agree on that. He is also describing what our bosses expect from us, writing code most of the time. But we often read HN, facebook, twitter... We need breaks but I indeed handle them unstructured. I will take some, but not all of his advice.