It's funny: several months ago I decided to make 2009 the year of my return to the command line. I did it "for the lulz", and it ended up being my greatest prod

It's funny: several months ago I decided to make 2009 the year of my return to the command line. I did it "for the lulz", and it ended up being my greatest productivity hack ever. I moved personal and work email to Mutt and uninstalled my Gmail notifiers; I moved IM to bitlbee on irssi; I moved RSS to Newsbeuter; and I moved Twitter to ttytter. I keep all of this running in a screen on my remote shell. And this was certainly not the intent of my project when I started it, but I can't even begin to tell you what a difference it's made for my productivity. I usually leave my screen on an empty shell prompt, so even if I see my terminal I've got no idea what's going on in those other terms unless I actively go looking for them. Granted, I have the luxury of working at a small startup (< 20ppl) and I can maintain some aloofness with regard to IM (because if a colleague really needs something from me I've probably not more than 20ft away), but as far as this other stuff goes, do you really need to know what's happening on Twitter in realtime? Is there ever really an email so important that it can't wait until you've finished your current thought?