Identifying Daily Distractions: 3 Ways to Disable
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
via: Michael Stagg – www.myiisense.com
Identifying Daily Distractions
Any number of things can hinder or prevent us from being as productive as we can be. We can become sidetracked with busy work and mess up our timeline on a project. Friends or family may stop over unexpected while we are working from home or studying. We could be spending our time on things that serve no other purpose than to eat away at our time.
The best thing we can do is:
- Admit that there are distractions around us.
- Figure out what are the sources of our distractions
- Take simple steps to eliminate or limit them.
I’ve recently developed a list of things to do to disable many of my own distractions. Here’s a shortened version for your review.
Disable all Notifications on Facebook: Constantly receiving emails and/or texts above messages, who has “friended” me, who replied to my posts does nothing but take away from time I could be using on more important things. Unchecking these annoying notifiers has saved me an average of 45 minutes a day according to RescueTime (This is a great time management tool, by the way, and it’s free!). In fact, I’ve applied this to all my social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. Doing so not only allows you to stay focused on the task at hand but it also cuts the amount of useless email you have to delete. This brings me to my next hack: Email Notifications
Disable or Limit Email Announcements: I use the email client Outlook to manage all of my email. I noticed that if I’m working on a project and I hear or see an email notification from Outlook I instinctively want to click it to read the email. Huge time sink! What is really bad is the email I’m taken to is usually nothing important (Like a Facebook notification, ugh!) and I end up regretting taking time to open it. Similar to what I did with Facebook, I went to the email settings in Outlook and disabled all notification and instead check email once every hour manually or when I request to have someone send me something. According to RescueTime, I’ve been saving about 15-20 minutes a day doing this.
Disable Instant Messengers: OK, I used to IM everyone – a lot! Again, each time I saw one of my friends log on I had to say hello. What was intended to be a short conversation ends up being 30 minutes or more of time that could have been used to accomplish a more meaningful task. I gained an astonishing 3-4 hours a day by not logging on to my messenger programs! Ouch!
Trust me when I say there are about a half a dozen more ways I combat distraction but I want to hear from you guys. What are some the ways to take back your time and cut down on distractions?
