You know the feeling. You sit down to begin working on a project, the phone rings and you end up talking for a half hour. Suddenly you are thirsty, after all, who isn’t after they’ve been talking for a half hour or so? Walking into the kitchen, you realize that it is almost lunch time. You might as well get something to eat too, right?
Before you know it, it’s 3pm and you’ve determined to set regular hours and stick to them this time. Bummer. Maybe tomorrow?
So tomorrow comes and you begin thinking, what can I do different to be more productive here?
Discipline is Key
The hardest part about minimizing distraction is finding a balance of discipline and making it a habit. Here are a few tips that could work for you to get you on track with a disciplined regimen.
Set up a Google calendar with SMS alerts sent to your cell phone. Set this up however you ultimately would like your schedule to look like. If you have repetitious tasks that you must accomplish at a certain time and need to remember, put these in too. Ultimately, this will keep you from gazing at the clock on your desk. In fact, just put your cell phone on your desk and get rid of the clock. Watching the clock is probably one of the worst things you can do for yourself. The day will feel like it drags on, and it will sap you of any creative energy that you could put into your work. Alternatively, you can use something like an egg timer if you don’t have unlimited text messaging on your calling plan. Just set times for specific tasks, but don’t make it too regimented or you will rebel from your own plan.
Once you have your schedule set. Leave it. Don’t mess with it.
Email is great, but…
It can hinder your ability to accomplish anything. I know I am an email hound. I check it way too often.
I get a lot of ads, spam and just random requests about different things like I am sure you do too.
When I moved out of the city recently, we got an apartment where we have to pick up our mail down at the post office box instead of being dropped off at our door. It used to be that I’d check up to five times seeing if the mail had come yet (because the mailman came at different times every day). I also learned something. If I pick up my mail at predetermined times, like when I go to the store or for our case, when we go on lunch break or right when we get back or about 20 minutes before we get off work, we don’t spend so much time sorting email into the spam filter and actually end up accomplishing more.
Unless you’ve already set a bad precept for getting your email and responding immediately, nobody really expects an immediate response. If they did, they would have text messaged you, or called (or walked across the room to bug you instead).
Busy Status is for when you are busy.
Text messaging is great, but they put little
“busy” notification options on those things for a purpose. Use them or turn off the skypes and gtalks when you are working. It’s acceptable to just turn them off to let people know you are busy too. Most of these will let you leave a message that will be delivered when you come back on. Check these when you check your email if that works for you or on Skype, just go invisible.
CTRL+11 (for stumbleupon users)
This little combination of keystrokes has probably saved me countless hours of time as a blogger. Just as StumbleUpon can help you, it can also hurt your productivity if you let it. If you are on a windows machine with firefox installed and the stumbleupon toolbar, CTRL+11 will hid/reveal your stumble toolbar.
But since you are here, and already thinking about stumbleupon, feel free to hit that little combination of keystrokes to reveal your stumble button and stumble this post if you have liked it.
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Hello, my name is William Lehman and I write here.
