by Chris Bailey
There are many apps available that cut you off from distractions. A few of my favorites for computer are Freedom (paid, though there’s a free trial—Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad), Cold Turkey (free, though there’s a paid version—Windows, Mac, Android), and RescueTime (paid, though there’s a free trial—PC, Mac, Android, Linux). Most of these cost a few dollars a month for the pro version, but you’ll earn that money back in increased productivity. The research backs this up: people who deploy distraction blockers are more productive and focus for longer periods of time.
If your workplace restricts what apps or plug-ins you can install on your computer, consider either unplugging the Ethernet cable or completely shutting off your computer’s WiFi. This sounds extreme, but we spend a lot of our internet time procrastinating.
Get out of the office. If you work in a more flexible office environment, you might find a distraction-free mode can incorporate working out of the coffee shop downstairs or in a meeting room.
Be thoughtful and don’t underestimate (or overestimate) the social costs of your distraction-free mode. Consider the effects of shutting yourself off from your coworkers, especially if your workplace is a social environment. At the same time, don’t overestimate the social costs: while you might feel guilty closing your email client for thirty minutes, remember that your clients and coworkers frequently wait an hour or two for you to respond when you’re caught in meetings. This is a lesson I’m relearning constantly: as a general rule, your coworkers need you a lot less than you think they do.
Treat yourself. After I’ve completed a hyperfocus session and I leave my distraction-free mode, I’ll occasionally treat myself to an all-you-can-eat buffet of distractions. Research shows that the more impulsive you are, the more stressed you become by blocking yourself from distractions. If you do have little self-control, or if you’re impulsive, indulging in the odd distraction break can be beneficial. (Side note: impulsiveness is also the character trait most highly correlated with procrastination.) I also usually indulge a cup of matcha or coffee before entering back into my distraction-free mode, which positively reinforces my behavior to focus more deeply.
Create a distraction-free mode for your team. Dale Partridge, author of People Over Profit, went as far as to equip his team with lamps and squirt guns to encourage them to focus when he was CEO of Sevenly. As he explained to me, “One of the smartest things I did at Sevenly was to build custom walnut desk lamps for the entire team. They turned them on whenever they wanted to focus, and the rule was that no one was allowed to interrupt them when their lamp was on. All forty-five employees were allowed to have up to three hours of uninterrupted focus time per day—we had to limit it because that uninterrupted time was so addictive! I also equipped everyone with a squirt gun they could spray each other with when they were interrupted.”
The intensity of your distraction-free mode depends on your work environment. If you work for yourself or have an office with a door, you likely have more flexibility in eliminating distractions. If you work in a collaborative open-office environment, however, you may not be able to set up as strong a distraction-free mode as you’d like. Productivity is a process of understanding and adapting to your constraints.
I always experience an odd and wonderful sense of relief when I enter my distraction-free mode, and I think you will too. Suddenly you don’t have to tend to the news, your social media feeds, and a never-ending stream of email. You can relax, confident that you can no longer waste time and attention on mindless busywork. You accomplish meaningful work and hyperfocus for a longer period of time. And you know that because you’re investing your time, attention, and energy into just one task, you can slow down and work more purposefully.
A distraction-free mode also allows you to conserve energy. When you eliminate distractions, your energy goes further, and you can work for longer periods without needing a break. By disabling distractions ahead of time, you expend significantly less mental energy regulating your behavior in order to focus on your work. In turn, the less we have to regulate our behavior—when we don’t have to battle distractions or watch what we say as we deal with a difficult coworker—the more energy our work provides. Breaks are energizing for this same reason—they’re a pocket of time in which we can press pause on regulating our behavior. You may find that even though you intended to hyperfocus for only a short amount of time, you have the energy to keep going long after.
A distraction-free mode is especially valuable after a vacation or long weekend, as during these periods you’ll have less energy and be more susceptible to distraction. Taming the distractions in your work ahead of time enables you to build up your energy as you settle back into your regular working rhythm.
WORKING WITH REDUCED DISTRACTIONS
Because it’s impossible to work in hyperfocus mode 100 percent of the time, we should also learn to enjoy the benefits of cutting back on distractions during other periods of our day. To figure out which ones are worth taming, ask yourself: What distractions interrupt your focus throughout the day that aren’t worth losing twenty or more minutes of productivity over? It isn’t possible to shut off these distractions entirely, and you might not even want to, but it is worth becoming more thoughtful about what interrupts your work.
Email is a great example of a distraction that’s important to tame but not eliminate. Email is a weird beast: it consumes a lot more attention than it does time. (Meetings are the opposite, generally consuming more time than attention.) Eliminating email would obviously not be realistic, but try to become more deliberate about when you check for messages. Doing so will allow you to regain control over your attention. Whenever you have email notifications enabled, you permit your coworkers to interrupt your focus on a whim—the instant you receive an email notification, you’ve lost control. Choosing when you check for messages ahead of time means you maintain control over your attention and resist slipping into autopilot mode.
Setting a specific time to focus on distractions like email, meetings, your smartphone, and social media transforms them from distractions into merely other purposeful elements of your work and life. Technology should exist for our convenience, not for the convenience of anyone who wants to interrupt us. Countless things clamor for our attention over the course of a day. Below I’ve chosen five of the most common pain points: a constant flood of notifications; smartphones (and other distracting devices); email; meetings; and, finally, the internet.
Notifications
An activity I recommended earlier in this book was to scroll through the notification settings on all of your devices and disable audible and vibrating alerts for interruptions you can safely live without. Leaving default settings turned on will flood you with a constant stream of interruptions. It’s also worth limiting certain apps to interrupting you on only one device—there’s no reason for your phone, tablet, watch, and computer to all inform you that you’ve received an email notifying you that your favorite clothing store is having a sale.
Disabling most audible and vibrating alerts is a simple change but one that’s totally profound in practice: you suddenly get to choose when you’re interrupted by your phone, rather than your phone deciding when to interrupt you. I personally just scan for new text messages and notifications when I check the clock on my phone.
Every notification pulls you away from what you’re doing and reminds you there’s an entire digital world you’re missing out on. Notifications are deceiving, for while it takes just a second to glance at one, that moment can suck you into a digital vortex in which you easily lose a half hour of your time and attention. Not many notifications are worth this productivity drain.
That said, many notifications are worth receiving 100 percent of the time—phone calls, for example. While I check my email just once a day—as I’ll discuss below—I’ll often turn on a notification for just one sender if I’m waiting for an important m
essage. Doing this takes a minute or two, but I easily earn that time back in how much more deeply I’m able to focus. This lets me stop worrying and compulsively checking my inbox every few minutes. Setting up your email to receive notifications only for a group of “VIP senders” is also possible in most email applications and lets you decide who can interrupt you throughout the day.
As well as dealing with individual notifications, it’s also possible to block when you allow apps to distract you. One of my favorite daily rituals is to put my smartphone and other devices in airplane mode between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. This is when I have the least energy and am more likely to fall victim to distractions. Plus, research shows we’re less likely to multitask when we end our daily activities and go to bed early the night before. If enabling airplane mode feels too drastic, consider enabling your phone’s “do not disturb” mode while you work.
Your Smartphone (and Other Devices)
Apart from managing the notifications that your devices pop up, it’s worth becoming deliberate about when, where, and how often you use those devices.
Your phone is probably your most stimulating and novel object of attention, and you’re absolutely going to be tempted by it, especially when the task you’re working on becomes more intimidating or complex. Over time, I’ve changed my relationship with my phone—instead of seeing it as a device that should stay attached to my hip for the entire day, I’ve started to regard it as a powerful, more annoying computer. Their cellular radios aside, our phones have the same parts as a computer—but for some reason, perhaps because they provide us with so much stimulation and validation throughout the day, we allow them to interrupt us constantly, infinitely more than our computers. We shouldn’t give any shiny rectangular device so much power.
Once I began viewing my smartphone as just a more distracting computer, I kept it stowed in my laptop bag instead of my pocket. And, most important, I made sure I had a good reason before checking it. This shift in attitude has enabled me to use my phone with intention, rather than on autopilot mode. Every time you pick up your phone without intent, you derail your attention for no good reason.
Here are a few more strategies to prevent your phone (and other devices) from taking over your life:
Mind the gaps. Resist the urge to tap around on your smartphone when you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, walking to the coffee shop, or in the bathroom. Use these small breaks to reflect on what you’re doing, to recharge, and to consider alternate approaches to your work and life. In these moments, mindlessly burning time on the phone isn’t worth it—doing so eliminates the valuable space in your schedule.
Do a phone swap. Swap phones with a good friend or significant other when you’re at dinner or hanging out. That way, if you have to look something up, make a call, or take a picture, you’ll have a device to do it with—but one that won’t suck you into a personalized world of distraction.
Strategically use airplane mode. Flip your phone into airplane mode when working on an important task or having coffee with someone. It’s impossible to share quality time without also sharing quality attention. Enabling airplane mode makes a bigger difference than merely putting your phone in your pocket, as in the latter case you’re still aware that notifications and distractions are piling up and waiting for you. Airplane mode completely eliminates the possibility that a notification will disrupt your work. You can then deal with these alerts on your own terms later.
Buy a second “distractions” device. This may sound a bit silly, but I recently bought an iPad that I use for one sole purpose: as a distractions device. I keep few social media apps (and no email app) on my phone and instead use my iPad for all things distracting. Delegating those tasks to the iPad—which I leave in another room—lets me focus for longer, and more deeply, in the event I do need to keep my smartphone by my side. Buying a tablet for this sole purpose is a sizable investment at first, but your attention is worth it.
Create a “Mindless” folder. Try housing your most distracting apps—the ones that pull you into autopilot mode—in a “Mindless” folder on your phone or tablet. The folder’s name will serve as an additional reminder that you’re about to distract yourself.
Prune your list of apps. Scroll through your phone and delete the apps on which you waste too much time and attention—social media and news apps included. Doing so can feel oddly refreshing, a sort of spring cleaning for your phone. Consider which apps duplicate functionality with those on your other devices. Your email app may not be worth keeping if you also access email on your tablet; an investment app you check compulsively might be worth deleting if you can access the same information on your laptop.
In the last thirty years, more and more devices have crept into our lives. For me, the process started with my first laptop well over a decade ago. Later I bought a dumb feature phone and then an even more distracting smartphone. Next came an iPad and a fitness tracker. I’m sure there will be more devices in my future.
This speaks to a trap we increasingly face: bringing new devices into our lives without first questioning their value. Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, developed a useful way of assessing the devices in your life: question what “jobs” you “hire” devices to do for you. Every product we buy should do a job for us—we hire Kleenex to blow our nose; Uber to get from one place to another; OpenTable to book a table at a restaurant; Match.com to find a partner.
We hire our phones to do a lot of these “jobs,” maybe more than any other product we own. We hire them to be an alarm clock, camera, timepiece, GPS navigator, video game console, email and messaging machine, boarding pass, music player, radio, subway pass, datebook, map, and so much more. It’s no wonder we spend so much time on them.
As we accumulate more devices, their jobs can become redundant. The only reason I have a tablet today is because I hire it as my distractions device. If I didn’t need that particular service, it’s likely I would have hired the tablet to do the exact same job done by my phone and computer—helping me surf the web and using social media—and it would have been totally unnecessary.
I recently got rid of my fitness tracker for this very reason—while it was a lot of fun at first, I couldn’t remember what job I’d hired it to do. Several years back, I got rid of my TV and cable subscription for a similar reason: Netflix became my hire of choice for passive entertainment.
Before you buy another device, ask yourself: What jobs am I hiring it to do that the devices I already own can’t? Thinking about your devices this way forces you to consider why you really own them and, perhaps even more important, enables you to bring devices into your life only with intention.
Email
In the knowledge economy, email is one of the largest distractions we face every day—it’s usually the largest pain point for the people I speak to and coach (with meetings being a close second).
One of the best strategies to tame email is to limit how many email notifications you receive, which limits how frequently you’re interrupted. Sixty-four percent of people use notifications with either audible or visual signals to alert them to new messages—if you fall into this category, you’re probably spending too much time and attention on email.
In addition to limiting new message alerts, here are ten of my favorite email tactics. These will help you check your email more deliberately, and constrain how much time and attention you spend on it in the first place. Many of these strategies also work for other messaging apps, such as Slack.
Check for new messages only if you have the time, attention, and energy to deal with whatever might have come in. This is a simple trigger that lets you make sure you can actually deal with new messages, instead of getting stressed by the new stuff to which you have to respond.
Keep a tally of how often you check for messages. The average knowledge worker checks his ema
il eleven times per hour—eighty-eight times over the span of a day. It’s hard to get any real work done with so many interruptions. The same study found that employees spend an average of just around thirty-five minutes on email per day—which means that email consumes much more attention than it does actual time. Once you become aware of how often you check for new messages, you’ll likely want to reduce that amount of time because of the high cost of interruptions.
Predecide when you’ll check. Determining ahead of time when you’ll check for new messages works wonders for reducing the number of times you open your email. Seventy percent of emails are opened within the first six seconds of receipt, so shutting off notifications will help you work in a less agitated and reflexive way. I personally check new messages once a day at 3:00 p.m. and have an autoresponse that notifies people of this. If this frequency is unrealistic for your work, come up with a compatible number—as long as it’s less than eighty-eight times over the span of a workday, you’ll be doing better than average. It helps to schedule these blocks of time on your calendar and set an autoresponse, both to make you feel more comfortable and to hold you socially accountable. If you still find email too tempting, enable a distraction blocker to cut yourself off. Eighty-four percent of workers keep their email client open in the background as they work, but closing it will help you focus beyond the forty-second mark.