Setting is almost everything. If I'm located in a coffee shop or the office, short-order work and limited attention-span tasks are all I can manage. In my home office, near the coffee maker, a futon for naps, an ashtray for atmospheric smoke, and the humming familiarity of the Internet, energized by the myth of uninterrupted blocks of time, I can bury myself in periodic snacks, pyjama bottom externalizing, multiple applications and multimedia bits, effortless focus and indulgent distractions (This American Life audio clips on Mind Games, New York Times stories on Breaking Up in a Digital Fishbowl, Facebook messages and email notes and blog entries and twitter glances and MS Word paragraphs and YouTube lyrics and man-whale ecologies via the Georgia Aquarium and Rock Island).
But all of these episodes are supposed to somehow come together in a coherent "to-do" list and in a completed online course on Advanced Instructional Design. That'll be a fine turn of events and I'm eager to see how it works itself out.
