Here’s How To Silence Distractions For A More Enjoyable Job

Imagine it's the end of another work day. You've been "busy" all day but you go home feeling like you got NOTHING done.

It's a terrible feeling, right?

Udemy's 2018 Workplace Distraction Report found 34% of survey respondents like their jobs less because of distractions. While over half of people aren't performing as well as they should.

The average knowledge worker "checks in" on email and messaging apps every 6 mins.

It’s your responsibility to tool yourself to fight distraction, maintain focus and accomplish your goals.

Strategies

Follow these strategies to achieve focus mode.

Use distraction blockers

Use tools that add friction to tempting websites so you can focus on the work at hand.

Try these blocker apps:

• Cold Turkey
• Freedom
• Rescue Time

Use music to increase concentration

Noise can be a major distractor. Forget a productive day with your squawking colleagues or a child having a meltdown in the cafe. Block out all those noises that might distract you with your favourite melodies.

Both Focus@Will and Brain.fm are apps/websites dedicated to inducing focus mode through audio.

Pro tip: get some noise cancelling headphones.

Block out time

Try scheduling work hours well in advance on a calendar, like two or four weeks ahead of time. It works on the basis of “What Gets Scheduled Gets Done”.

Here are four basic blocks to avoid losing control of your day:

• Focus blocks used to crunch out important work and thinking.
• Admin blocks to clear work that doesn’t require deep mental effort.
• Meeting blocks are time reserved to batch meetings.
• Recovery blocks are variable-length blocks of time that you use for exercise, meditation, and self-care.

Pomodoro technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.

It’s simple, Here’s how it works:

• Choose a task
• Set your timer for 25 minutes
• Work on the task until the timer ends
• Take a short break (around 5 minutes)
• Every 4 Pomodoro sessions, take a longer break (15-30 minutes)

Forest is a beautiful and fun way to stay focussed. Within the app, begin every focus session by planting a seed, the longer you stay focussed (by avoiding distracting websites) the bigger the tree grows. Give into temptation and the tree will wither. Forest is available as a browser extension and on iOS and Android.

Take control

Finally, look back over the advent calendar, over the last 22 days it’s covered a lot of strategies to combat distractions. Specifically…

• Regain Your Sanity, Take Control of Your Email Inbox
• Don't Be A Slave To Slack and
• Smartphone Notification Zen

Guest author

Today's article was written by Kumy Veluppillai. He's a product person and when not being a food snob, is exploring how minimalism fits into our digital life.