Many of you, over time, discovered that emailing me was darn near as fast as IMing someone else. I’ve long since largely signed off of AIM and MSN and Yahoo and the others because of the time vacuum they became for me, but now I’m even rolling back how frequently I check my email.

I’ve come to the realization that multi-tasking is a farce. Truly. It seems like you’re doing more, but in reality you’re doing more of less. So where a blog post will take me ten minutes to pound out. If I’m reading the news, emailing, talking on the cell phone and blogging, I can do all of those in 45 minutes, each of them has lower quality in the end and if I did them sequentially it would only take me thirty minutes to do all of them.

So, over the past week, I’ve begun experimenting. First, I removed the mail notifiers in Firefox. But even then I used the easy to access bookmarks and checked it even more frequently to see if I had any new email. So the next step was to actually create a second profile in Firefox solely for the use of email. When I open that account my start pages are my two main personal email accounts. That’s all that profile is for.

I was astounded by how much more I accomplished in my day. So I took it a step further.

I removed Google reader notifications, so I no longer have a new blog post to distract me every 3 minutes. Now I check my reader twice or three times a day. Yes I still read 70+ feeds, but with the mastery of the Google Reader key controls I can skim through them in a matter of ten minutes usually. Sharing or starring entries of interest to be read later.

I check my work email when I get to work, since I come in when the other employees are halfway through their day I have to catch up on any events or changes, but it doesn’t need me to keep Thunderbird open on the laptop. Now I check it after the completion of other tasks. At this point, I can pretty safely avoid opening Thunderbird for the rest of the day, everyone else is gone and it’s just me here.

It’s amazing how much more productive I am when I make tasks sequential rather than simultaneous.

Brian, Stephen and Patrick bring you another pod-tastic episode of WhatTheCast … and it contains no references to Paris Hilton or the iPhone

Comments? E-mail feedback@whatthecast.com Leave voice mail at 206-333-1931 (voicemail down until further notice). (more…)

I’ve had a lot of ideas this past weekend, most of them silly and pointless, but two of them stand out as standup ideas that could have a big effect.

Orlando was one of the first cities to adapt the RFID tags for use in tolls on our toll roads. We called it “E-Pass” and it’s been quite successful. Recently the units we have in the car for E-Pass have begun to beep in the vehicle to alert us that the account has been charged successfully. But what if the units didn’t charge your bank account, instead it plays a short commercial whenever you drive through a toll. Thus the advertiser is paying for your tolls. Now I realize that few advertisers would pay $0.75 per play, but I still think the idea has merit.

Update: My friends and I kept tossing this idea back and forth and the idea has it’s definite set of problems. The price for ads would be steep. There’s no way to guarantee the driver is listening. The radio could be on or they could muffle the speaker. But it isn’t an unsolvable series of problems.

The other idea is the one I think makes the most sense. Paypal has a stranglehold with online payment. A few companies have come up and tried to break the grip, Obopay is the most recent one I know of. Google Checkout is also gaining a following. But the most logical answer would be for Bank of America, or some other big bank in America, to start a competing company. They could waive the fees for any transaction which uses one of their bank accounts and charge fees for those who don’t use their bank. It’s so simple it seems like pure brilliance.

I went to the park this morning with K. We walked around for a bit and then suddenly I spotted this tree that was perfect for climbing. It wasn’t too large and had a number of solid off shoots. And K could only laugh as I yelled “TREE!!!” taking off like a bullet out of a rifle. Then I surprised even myself as I scurried up it, to declare it “Fort Jarrett” and also declare the tree a girl free zone.

I’m 23 folks. Who does this? I don’t know. I don’t even know the last time I climbed a tree. It was so much fun though that I think I may make it a habit to do more often. It was good to know I could still do it though. Now the sign of fitness will be how well can I do it rather than if I can do it.

Oh and for anyone curious, I finally got the Hydroxycut back to GNC. I tried once earlier this week but I had forgotten my receipt, so today I got it returned. No pills were taken and I’m much more at peace with myself.

Though, speaking of being healthy, if you have time to hit your grocery store I was happy to see they were carrying Rainier cherries. I highly recommend them. They’re sweeter than most cherries you’ll find (and naturally that sweet, not the soaked in HFCS sugar sweet of the ice cream cherries.)

After a slight hiatus, Brian and Crispy return to your MP3 player! Brian rants about US Customs at the Atlanta airport, Americans looking stupid on the international news and how to keep athletes from breaking so many laws. Crispy tries to get a word in edgewise while making strange references to professional wrestling.

In related news, Crispy has our MySpace profile up and running (if you’re into that sort of thing), and it’s not terribly ugly (unlike a lot of MySpace pages). Check it out!