Knocked off course

As so often, I launched my laptop with the intent of doing something, then saw something in an inbox (in this case Facebook's) that distracted me and I forgot what I was going to do. Which happens when walking around the house all the time too, of course, but the laptop and the web are particular dangers because there are so many potential distractors there. Particularly in the morning when I look at the S&P futures and there are all these stories there on Bloomberg begging to be read. Thank God I don't have a Bloomberg login and am limited in the number of stories I can read, or I could be there all day.

But the main thing that protects me from all of that is my task list and my routine, which in the morning is to read certain things in a certain order while sitting in certain places, consciously protecting myself from specific influences as I open to the world for the day. As I go, I shorten the horizon of what I am taking into consideration: moving from the very long view to the tasks of the day, always trying to integrate the latter into the former and keep the two (and the many time horizons between them) in alignment.