I have been crazy busy the last few weeks.  I’ve had both personal fun (went to a Penn State game, NYC, had company, ran the great race) and professional obligations (trying to get a swanky new version of a couple of our products out the door ASAP).  It has caused me to neglect my normal amount of reading blogs/news and following people on Twitter as well as showing up at local networking stuff like the Rhomania tasting I had to skip last Thursday and Wednesday’s Open Coffee Club.  I’ve come to an interesting conclusion this week though; not keeping up with news/twitter/networking actually hurts my productivity.

My feed is a good reminder that there are a lot of exciting things out there from Chris Dixon’s fantastic post on his lessons learned to the fact that AlphaLab‘s spinning up a new season and getting a visit from the President’s Men to fresh news that BodyMedia and Dynamics are making thrilling progress.  All of that stuff inspires the crap out of me and leads me to work harder in my own pursuits.

The reality is that human nature prevents us from being heads down and focused 100% of the time.  Try to use some of the time that you’re going to putter away naturally to soak up the reasons you’re so focused most of the time.