Productivity slump

from xkcd, a nerdy physics and computer programming based web comic that I absolutely adore  

I've been doing a fairly good job this quarter with keeping up with things, and so it was a little bit disappointing yesterday when I had my least productive day of the quarter by far.  There were quite a few contributing reasons:

• went out drinking on Friday night
• the weather was crappy, automatically reducing motivation
• had coffee with the ex - never a good idea if you want to focus on work
• I cooked all my meals yesterday, which takes a substantial amount of time

But I think there are 2 primary reasons I am frustrated by how yesterday went.

1. I haven't scheduled any me-time.  Even on days where I do no schoolwork, I usually am trying to tackle things off my to do list (including yesterday, when I went to get my battery replaced at the Apple store and then grocery shopping).  Unsurprisingly, my brain just shut off yesterday and no matter how long I sat in front of the computer, I managed to find other ways to spend my time.  The Making of a Corporate Athlete, a great article introduced to me by Orlando, talks about how just like physically, muscles need rest cycles between workouts to be order to grow and stay healthy, mental and emotional energy requires rest cycles to have sustained high performance.  In the future, I am going to try to build in a full day of restoration every 2 or 3 weeks, devoted to something fun which I actually enjoy doing, which is preferable to spending a whole day unsuccessfully trying to work and constantly kicking myself for not being able to.  Luckily, I have a few weeks of break coming up where I plan to do nothing but sleep, eat, exercise, and read.  I can't think of the last time I curled up on the coach with a musty tome borrowed from the library, and that used to be one of my favorite activities in the world.  
2. There are just too many frickin distractions.  I am sorely tempted to delete my Facebook account.  I was a late adopter to Facebook, only creating my account once I moved internationally so I could keep up with my US based friends.  I can see the value in maintaining weak ties, but I think it has gotten to the point where I miss the days when friends would call each other up to find out what's going on, rather than just following & commenting on Facebook.  It is far too easy to waste hours surfing through old friends pages and pictures, and similarly, as my Twitter stream velocity increases, clicking one link too often leads to me coming to my senses 45 minutes later, having meandered my way through an interesting online discussion on a current event or technological trend.  Even my friends, whom I love dearly and cherish the opportunity to stay in touch with, chat with me on messengers with the inevitable result of losing focus on work.  Now, the majority of the time I have been exercising self control by closing all extraneous applications, but when I am in a productivity funk like yesterday, it becomes a pathological impulse to let each distraction carry me away.  The author of xkcd, in the above comic, talks about how he created not only a 30 second delay between loading of web pages and chat clients, but also restricted his OS so that multiple programs could not be run at once.  This is a fairly hard line to take, but I can see the need and have yet to find my own methodology to truly take control of this issue.