Over the next several months I'll be working on my book, teaching at RbMU, and doing some other writing and coding for the free software community. Because I'll be doing that stuff full time and keeping my commercial responsibilities to a minimum, I have both a need and an opportunity to adjust my ways of communicating online to avoid a feeling of being always on. My new schedule isn't going to be anything radical, but it is a big change for me because recently I've gotten in the habit of obsessively checking twitter and email since there's always something there.

Effective immediately, unless you have scheduled a meeting with me or I've said I'll be around otherwise, you can expect me to be active on twitter and email at these times and these times only:

• The first hour of my working day (typically 9-10am EDT)
• 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after lunch (typically 12:30-1 and 2:00-2:30 EDT)
• The last hour of my working day (typically 4-5pm EDT)
• 30-60 minutes at some point before I go to sleep (highly variable)

For those of you who might have a need to reach me urgently, you can always feel free to ping me on Skype. It's one of the few services that I typically only use for SERIOUS BUSINESS, so it's not a distraction to keep it on throughout the day. Of course, please consider whether your need to contact me is actually urgent before contacting me this way, as most things can safely wait a couple hours.

This shouldn't have any effect on when you can send me emails or mention me on twitter. It's only a schedule I'm imposing on myself to help me have greater periods of uninterrupted focus throughout the day, which should help me make the Ruby Mendicant Experiment that much more successful. Also, since this is primarily about me managing unanticipated or casual communications rather than pre-scheduled meetings, don't worry if I'm meeting with you at a time outside of this schedule, as long as you've worked it out with me ahead of time.

This may be the most boring blog post I've ever written, but making a public commitment to at least try this out is going to help me get it started. I'll report back in a month with how well it worked out (or didn't).