Still, if I need super focus, your idea of shutting off IM completely is a good idea.

Secondly, I’ve foud that separating my email accounts in Entourage into ‘work’ and ‘personal’ has been very good. It’s clear when I’m doing work or personal email this way.

I’ve also reduced the retrieval times for my email — more active in the morning when hotter requests generally come in, and more sparse in the afternoon when I do more of my big blocks of work.

-logging in as root, launching terminal, and typing “rm -rf /” {warning to all three readers of Matt’s blog: don’t try this}

-prison

-pretending to be Amish for the day

I remember having a discussion with someone who wanted to build a stationary bike system which would allow him to watch television only when he was on his exercise bike (basically, powering the TV from the bike). He had drawn up diagrams and gone so far as to buy some of the parts. I think the goal was to watch less TV and lose some weight.

He didn’t like what I had to say, which was, “why don’t you just turn off the damn TV and ride your already perfectly-working bike every once in a while?”

OK, I’ll admit that I turn off Mail when I think it necessary, but really–wouldn’t a little self-control do the trick, or does that part of the brain require a cron script too? ;)