Getting things done

It seems that despite having a very important work deadline today I am destined to be interrupted every five minutes. Unfortunately I need to concentrate to get this done. And while i managed to get "in the zone" earlier, now I cannot string two words together.

This seems to be a recurring theme recently, my productivity is horribly low because I get interrupted all the time for "can you just" jobs. I turn the phone ringer off and hide my email window and I get called on my mobile and get asked why don't you answer your phone?

Its not so much the time lost to answering the specific query or doing the job but more my context switch time to restore to my previous task becomes huge. Somehow my switching time is absolutely non linear and today it has become so large I have decided to dump state altogether.

Because I know I have to do the school run soon and the interruptions continue I have abandoned the critical task altogether for now in the hope I can get back to it fresh. Do others get this I wonder? or is it a personal fault I should strive to fix? I know I used to be able to deal with this sort of thing with much less trouble, maybe I am getting less flexible as I age?

Fortunately (umm, you know what I mean) the Entropy Key software has some cleanups required which is an easy job and does not matter if I get interrupted so I do have a productive task to complete.

Oh speaking of the entropy key Niel blogged something silly I created the other day. I had a senior moment and filked the children's nursery rhyme "If You're happy and you know it" slapping some guitar chords on it.

It seems I cannot simply leave well enough alone and last Friday night (with the help of Mark Hymers) I made it a whole lot worse. I present to you the score of "If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise" for piano and guitar. In fact I wrote this out in rosegarden so it can be turned into a midi file etc. all the source files are available. It is released under a CC license so I suppose someone could put the lyrics back to the proper nursery rhyme and use it for something less tacky.