6 steps to complete distraction on my way to productivity

Today I wanted to Buffer a few tweets from my Twitter stream. Yet this is not quite how my venture turned out.

Here is what happened instead:

1.) Should I Buffer Tweets?

I wanted to Buffer a few tweets from twitter.com, and found one interesting user with a blog about Social Media and Web development. So I thought about getting in touch and dropping him an email if he was interested in a guestpost.

2.) Or write an Email?

Whilst writing the email, I realized I should send him over a few samples of past blogposts I have written and searched through the archives. One that was worth mentioning was a post I wrote for Social Media Examiner.

3.) Or find the right post?

So I went to Social Media Examiner and wanted to look for my post. Over there though, the latest post about how book reviews can be useful for bloggers caught my attention, since I was just about to write my own first Book review.

So instead I started to read this post and watching Mike Stelzner’s video about why reviewing books is a powerful concept.

4.) Rather check in on CoTweet?

Then I realized I haven’t checked the BufferApp co-tweet account for a little while. I briefly checked, finding this very interesting tweet from @KallumWilkes:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/kallumwilkes/status/65038213185671169″]

5.) Or follow my intuition for a post?

I sent a thank you note, which then triggered me to think this: “Hang on, it might be that other’s too find their native stream on Twitter.com more useful again with this feature.”

So I decided to write a post I titled “How to Make The Native Twitter Stream Relevant Again” and went looking for a blog that might be interested in this.

6.) Or just write this one!

Then it struck me. This was totally not what I started out with at 1.). I had a good laugh and thought, why not make this experience into a blogpost? After all it will also act as a to do list with 1-6 mentioned here.

Is being distracted bad?

I also asked myself this: Is the ease of which I am getting distracted so bad? After all I had a lot of new ideas to work on and fortunately also realized early enough that I better finish them all individually.

What is your experience with getting distracted? Is there something like “good distraction” (more ideas) and “bad distraction” (Facebook).

Let’s discuss it below, looking forward to your views!

PS: I didn’t put any links into this one, don’t want you to get too distracted ?