Author: Bob Walsh (original article). Translation: Sergey Mozhaisky It started rather innocently a few years ago, didn’t it? It didn’t feel like breaking the law or like a crime. Nobody got hurt — if there’s no victim, there’s no crime, right? Besides, everyone does it! It’s no worse than that candy you swiped off the shelf at the store, right? They didn’t catch you then, and they won’t catch you now.
At least, that’s what you tell yourself. Or try to tell yourself. Maybe if you say it enough times, you’ll convince yourself and be able to look in the mirror again without flinching.
But I know you’re stealing — and so do your friends, your colleagues, the girl you’re trying to impress. We all know.
You are stealing time from yourself.
A few minutes here, a website there, chatting with a friend on IM, checking out the latest cool thing online that you won’t even remember in 10 minutes. When you keep doing things that hurt you and can’t stop, you need help.
Email after email, site after site, bit by bit — we are becoming an online nation of thieves, stealing our own productivity, focus, hopes, dreams, and futures. So you want to build a real future for yourself — say, a real software company you can proudly say “I built it. Me!”? Theft won’t get you there, my friend.
We call ourselves “digital nomads,” “internet workers,” “freelancers,” “startups” — but any real nomad who got distracted as easily as we do would have been a pile of bones in the desert long ago. And if we had real bosses — the kind of bastards who watch your every move at work — we’d be fired by the end of the week.
The real world does not reward stupidity. And trying to build something while working for yourself, yet frittering your workday away on piles of email, IM, and pointless websites, is just stupid and will lead nowhere but disappointment.
Keeping your email client / browser / IM / Twitter running constantly during the parts of the day when you’re supposed to be working on something is no less criminal than driving while texting and watching a DVD player at the same time. Someone will get hurt, and it will be your own fault.
Don’t get me wrong — I genuinely love every part of the online world I have the pleasure of being part of. And I do exactly what I described in this article. And like a drunk wrestling with a bottle, every time I know it was the wrong thing to do. The point is: you have to recognize that it’s bad, that it’s hurting you, and you have to make yourself stop.
If you laughed at this article, you were laughing at yourself. And if this article annoyed or offended you, know this: the words that irritate you the most are always the ones most worth listening to.