Congress should take some good advice from Scoble - get more done by disconnecting

I've written some of my best articles on flights home. Now I realize why:

Four weeks ago I had 5,250 emails in my inbox. Today? 10.

What's the difference? I've been on lots of airplanes in the past month. Why is that important? Because in airplanes there's no Internet. Nothing to distract you. I find I can answer about 10x more email in a plane than I can on the ground when the Internet is there to distract me.

That taught me an important lesson.

Want to get something done? Turn off Twitter. Turn off Facebook. Turn off blog comments. Turn off FriendFeed. Turn off Flickr. Turn off YouTube. Turn off Dave Winer's blog and Huffington Post. Turn off TechMeme.

Turn off the distractions.

Wow. That's blunt. On the other hand, maybe Congress would get more done if cable news didn't generate another outrage to be handled every few days. Think about it. How many "action alerts" generate tons of constituent spam from people who are barely interest in a cause? Just enough to fill out a form, not enough to call. What if Congress only listened to those who cared enough to do more than click a few buttons? Is E-Government really the answer, or do we need to slow down and pay attention to the most intense voices instead of the ones that repeat the same message over and over again? 

24 hour news cycle. Email. Twitter. RSS feeds. Click to complain forms. Nancy Grace. Turn it all off. 

Good advice.