What's with a puddle and productivity?

My friend sent me a video today in a Whatsapp group. Since the current trend is to share gory videos of the boy who got mauled by the tiger, I decided not to check it out. However, my friend then confirmed that it wasn't the dreaded tiger video, but one that even the kids would enjoy watching. As such fun videos go, it had all the elements of slapstick to it. There was a young fella merrily walking down a puddle-filled path, jumping enthusiastically into every puddle until he falls into one big pothole. The water comes right up to his neck! The poor fellow hauls himself out, does a quick U-turn and heads back the way he came.
As promised, the video was definitely entertaining. But it also reminded me of a similar kind of puddle that I face almost daily, often fall into, and struggle to get out of. Distractions: those are the puddles I am talking about. You know, like you plug in your phone to charge in the morning and decide you will just check if your friend texted you back last night. It will just take a minute, you think, and there you will be 15 minutes later, with half a tweet composed, numerous Facebook photos and statuses liked and downloading a few articles to Pocket to read later! Not to mention catching up on the 133 messages in various Whatsapp groups! Oops... was that a pothole or what?
Now these pothole-sized distractions turn up everywhere, from the short video your friend shares at work, which has numerous other interesting video links to click at the end; to the 'urgent' email from a client, which you go to attend to, leaving the major project you were busily working on! And bam! That's probably a nice time-black hole that you stepped into. Perhaps, it could be because I am a lot less disciplined than I like to be. But I am also a note-taker and list-maker. And I've been running a small experiment to see if I can put my distractions to good use and up my productivity at the same time.

Pic courtesy: http://cdn0.stocksy.com/

See, these distractions are not necessarily all bad. You know, sometimes, they inspire me to tweet something nice or give me a thread for a story or lead me to an interesting site that I now love to read. But on the whole, these little lost pockets of time were turning into a gross loss of productivity, and consequently, some self-image bashing. So here's what I did: I decided to give the distractions their own slot. For instance, if I am at work, I close my big pothole tabs, mainly mail, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest (ah, this could have been a whole post in itself) and concentrate on the project of the moment for anything from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on its nature and complexity. Admittedly, I sometimes use my phone's timer to help with this. After the self-allotted time is done, I reward myself with five minutes of puddle time!

At home, this sometimes means turning off data/Wifi (on particularly unruly days) and tending to my plants, my kids, my book, my husband, my curry or whatever really deserves my attention at that point. (Mostly, I just keep the phone away in a corner so that I don't look at it often. If someone needs me really urgently, I'm sure they will use that least-used function in a smartphone and just call!) I save up my puddle time at home in nice, big hourly chunks that I use once early in the morning--after the elder one goes off to school, the hubby on his walk, and the toddler is (hopefully) still asleep in bed--and then later at night, after everyone is tucked in and I have had my Masterchef Australia fix. All in all, the experiment is turning out to be quite a success. I have 'gained' so much time and I also get my fun, which means I can still jump into puddles without fearing the pothole.