NextAction! - Managing the top of your mind

While working I often find myself making a [wikipedia:Context_switch] between what I'm actually busy with and something completely arbitrary like checking my mail every time I hit a slight interrupt in my work. These context switches, as is the case with a computer, tend to be a very expensive operations.

For example, often when I click compile it's -> Alt-Tab -> Outlook -> No New Mail -> Send/Receive for good measure -> Still no new mail -> Send/Receive just to make sure none arrived while the previous Send/Receive were processing -> and only then switching back to Visual Studio which has meanwhile finished compiling ages ago. Not only does this operation waste a lot of time in itself but it also takes a couple of seconds to regain focus on what exactly you were doing before you made the switch.

Now Leon Bambrick aka secretGeek, also the creator of the brilliant TimeSnapper [1] tool, came up with another ingenious desktop productivity tool that put other way more expensive productivity tools to shame. Enter NextAction. It's sheer brilliance is in its simplicity. A simple stack to store whatever you're currently working on hovering on your desktop. That's it. Nothing else, just keeping track of what you're doing right now and keeping this at the top of your mind.

From his post :The Top Of Your Mind Is A Very Very Small Place. And NextAction -- is a Very Very Small application to manage the top of your mind.

I've only been using it for a day but it's definitely worth checking out if your attention span, like mine, is one notch up from that of a [wikipedia:Goldfish] :-)

[1] - TimeSnapper is another light-weight tool that continuously runs in the background taking snapshots of your desktop which you can later play back and see just how much time you spend doing what...