23 November 2009 | Freelancing Tips, Fun | Alex

Remote freelancers have one distinct disadvantage when it comes to productivity. Distractions are everywhere! Working from home, there can be inevitable distractions – like your kids, the telephone, the pile of laundry, and pretty much anything else home-related. However, the lure of the most powerful distraction of all, the Internet, is shared by traditional office workers as well.

I find it helpful to set aside 30 minutes a day for what I call “avoidable distractions.” I peruse a few blogs, check in on some news sites, and drink my coffee before getting to work. That way I don’t have to feel guilty about feeding my curiosity later, and can go ahead and get it out of the way early on.

Everyone has different vices for online distractions, for instance visit YouTube.com and search for “puppies” or “kittens” and you’ll see around 6 million hits per video. Thankfully I do not have an addiction to watching these cute animal videos, but bizarre news and fascinating stories do grab my attention. This is a gray area of online reading that I find both helpful for my work, and distracting. Blogs and news stories contribute to my developing ideas as a writer, but sometimes the stories take me down a decidedly non-work rabbit hole. Below are some of the most interesting pieces that have passed my screen recently as part of my planned morning excursion into distraction.

	From the blog Dvorak Uncensored, comes a post about the CIA’s top secret “Acoustic Kitty” program. I know, I just said I’m not addicted to kittens, but this story is far from cute, it leaves one baffled by the absurd monetary cost, tickled by the hilarity of the concept, and appalled at the abuse to the cat.
	The Guardian and The Washington Post both reported from different angles recently on the controversy of Rupert Murdoch threatening to remove his publications from Google’s search results, and Microsoft responding with an offer to pay him to do it. All of this in an effort to achieve fair payment for the content of News Corp’s many news outlets, and to promote Microsoft’s Bing.
	Animated stereo images of old japan appeared last month on PinkTentacle.com, an all things Japanese blog with an emphasis on art and pop culture. The images combine two things rarely found together, authentic historic images and 3D.
	Apple Insider reported recently about the first “iPhone Worm,” that funnily enough has the sole purpose of rickrolling it’s victims and replacing their iPhone’s wallpaper with an image of Rick Astley. The worm only effect jailbroken iPhones (iPhones that have been hacked to remove any ties to one single mobile carrier.)
	The UK paper, the Daily Mail ran a story that brought to my attention the environmental impact of the shipping industry. Car and Jet pollution are on most of our radar screens, but the high sulfur fuel burned in container ships and oil tankers is apparently the worst offender of all (when looking only at the impact of sulfur, and not other agents).

Hopefully, you can be more productive than me this week by simply reading this consolidated post and not having to seek out all of these stories on your own… Let us know what you’ve found distracting this week, and how you handle your own work from home distractions in the comments!