I’m always fighting the lures of all this awesome media we have access to these days, primarily being Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds.  There are so many interesting people blogging, talking, and sharing now that one can spend all day looking at it.

And media now reaches all the way down into my desktop actively: RSS unread numbers popping up in my browser, Foursquare notifications through Growl, Echofon’s little icon turning blue…

Today I found my weapon in the war on distraction: my iPad.  I’ve always admired Paul Graham’s strategy on isolating a work machine from an internet machine, yet this is impossible if your work has primarily to do with the internet.  But the iPad gives me a way to anchor all of my consumption to a physically separate device, so that I can turn off all the literal bells and whistles on my laptop.

And given that the iPad has a modal interface, and I’m using OmniFocus to manage my work tasks, now I have to actively switch from work to play mode to get distracted even there.

It helps that (a) OmniFocus is so good on iPad I’m replacing my paper note strategy for GTD management, and (b) between Twitter for iPad, Flipboard, and Pulse, the iPad is now a vastly superior reading device to anything my laptop can do anyway.

The iPad’s role as a consumption device is often maligned, but if it lets my laptop become a more dedicated production device, then it’s a huge win.