Are you a victim of productivity pollution?

When are you most productive? Do you find yourself battling 7 fires at once with a BlackBerry in 1 hand while talking into your bluetooth headset, typing a reply to a friend over IM with another hand, and nodding vigorously at someone standing in your doorway? Is multi-tasking a term that applies to people slower than you?

[tag]Robert Scoble posted a nice short blog on the subject, and it was a breath of fresh air coming from some I consider a tad bit insane to stay as connected as he does. What did Robert have to say on the subject?

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer’s blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.

Turn off the distractions.

Today, people are guilty of allowing their attention to be distracted in too many different ways. If it isn’t normal mass media consumption like television, music, or games it’s the business media consumption like e-mail, smart PDA’s, and Instant Messaging.

Robert points to “attention management” as being the key. You have to simply choose your goals for the day reasonably. If you know you always have emergencies come up in the day, plan that time in.

A friend told me that he always over-budgets his time by 20%. That may sound like a too much padding, but if you think of the time it takes your mind to shift gears so many times, it really isn’t. Have you ever finished a day where you felt like there was a lot going – you were doing ’stuff’ – but you looked back and really didn’t get anything accomplished?

So here’s my favorite quote from this article: Linda Stone coined the term, “”continuous partial attention” which describes the kind of world we live in…”

Are you a victim of productivity pollution? How do you get clean and stay clean? For all you Twitterheads out there, get David Allen’s book Getting Things Done.