Does email make you less productive? Tim Ferris says yes and suggests checking your email a couple times a day.

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hands, did worse than the stoners by an average of 6 points.

I’m certain this is true. The first thing I used to with a new email set-up was to have it check for new mail every minute so I was never out of the loop. A loop being an apt description because all I was doing was spinning my wheels;

work -> read email -> back to work (what was I doing again?).

Have your email app check for mail once every hour or less. It’s hard enough to keep a bunch of method names and variables in your noggin without email getting in the way.

Now if I can just get my blog reading down to once a day I’ll be super productive :)

I installed my shiny new copy of Flash CS3 today and (after playing around with the new features) immediately was greeted with errors when compiling the Remoting project I’m working on.

The fix is to copy the needed packages from your Flash 8 install to a Classpath that Flash CS3 is looking for (best to make a new one rather than dump them with the CS3 classes). The old ones live in Macromedia Flash 8 -> First Run -> Classes -> mx and the packages you need are data, remoting, rpc, and services or you can download this zip file.

Remoting always seems to be the bastard step-child that is last to be updated or documented, with Flash 8 it was a couple of months before Macromedia decided to release the remoting components. Of course with AS3 you don’t need these packages as you use NetConnection instead like this or this.