Dilbert is rarely too far off the mark and this cartoon (which I saved back in November - the original online here) is no exception.
Being a vicar-geek means I've got lots of "time-saving-tools" online, which is great - on the face of it - from emailing to mobile phone transcription.
There are days, though, when I wonder just how the balance between "helpful" and "distracting" tips.
I'd dearly love to have a study with no computer, so I could make a deliberate decision each time to "do some computer work" rather than have it sitting there calling for my attention - that's what makes this cartoon feel so familiar. There's something insistent about the whine of a computer - there's always something to click on, an email to reply to, a link to follow, a new gadget to investigate.
So far, the best counter-weapon I've found is to switch the computer off at the end of the day and to leave it as long as I possibly can after the day starts before I switch it on... scuppered utterly at the moment by an eleven-day process (which I'm half way through) of backing up 60Gb of data online (if you've never thought about what you would do if you lost all 20,000 digital photos or all your music, files etc in a house fire, or if someone stole your computer, then you really should)... but I'm looking forward to pressing the off switch soon!
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