5 Strategies to Manage Distractions
And get your work done quicker and more efficiently.
And get your work done quicker and more efficiently.
Do you want to get projects done without being distracted and pulled off course? Your head is nodding yes, but I’m going to wager that within the next dozen minutes you will receive some sort of notification that will pull you away from whatever you happen to be working on. So how can we buckle down and get work done? What strategies can you implement today to be more productive? Can we really eliminate distractions?
Set a timeframe
Time is always a factor in our productivity, but it is not so much finding the time it's finding a suitably sized block of time to do what we need to do.
Spending five minutes here and five minutes there on a project is not productive, but spending a solid hour is. There are instances where idle minutes can be spent wisely on a task. For instance, when I’m waiting for my kids to finally finish their supper I like to pull out the laptop and get a few hundred words in whatever article or blog post I happen to have on the go. These are usually projects that are not for clients but to be eventually posted to Medium or a personal blog.
How many times have you tried and failed to spend ten or fifteen minutes getting a little work done?
It’s always those ten or fifteen minutes that we intend on spending on a project that ends up being squandered by notifications, alerts, chores, or other interruptions.
I work full time besides freelance writing, so I designate a few hours after the kids are in bed and the house is cleaned up, to devote solely to writing. Making sure there are no outstanding duties to be performed is vital since it is difficult to accomplish anything when you’re getting up to empty the dishwasher, take out the trash, or throw the wash in the dryer.
Have a plan
Don’t just sit down and assume that you’ll get everything done. You need to have a basic plan to maximize the use of your time. If you have one hour available then figure out the most efficient use of that hour, write down your plan, and then execute it.
Plan your work, work your plan.
Is this easier said than done? Of course it is, but that is why you write your plan down on paper that you keep next to you. All you have to do is follow your plan step by step.
A recent example I used just the other day is pictured below. Please ignore the horrific writing I didn't plan on posting it when I chicken scratched it in ink.
I do my best to adhere to this schedule verbatim. This can sometimes take a bit of discipline, but the act of writing down what I’m going to do has revolutionized my writing process and made me far more effective.
Turn the Phone off
Set your phone to airplane mode or better yet, shut it down. All of our phones could benefit from an hour or two of cooldown time. Then place the phone screen down and out of reach.
This little rectangle of distraction is probably what kills the most productivity in our modern world. I’m old enough to have lived through the full evolution, from brick cellphones to sleek smartphones.
I have watched as the world changed from a few dozen channels of bad TV, Blockbuster, and a corded landline, to hundreds of channels of even worse TV, so many streaming services that you spend more time searching than walking, and smartphones that never cease to surprise me as to just how much mindless entertainment they can cause.
I remember back before voicemail when we would miss a phone call and say ‘If it is important they will call back.’
You just need to trust me when I say that there are no notifications that can't wait an hour.
Set yourself up for success
Whatever the project you’ll be working on during your newfound time slot, what you need to do before you even start the clock, is get your workspace set up with everything you need.
Have all your tools, implements, beverages, and snacks ready for you to get down to work. Also, go to the washroom before you get started as well because that halfway bathroom break in which you inevitably spend far too much time watching TikTok is killing your productivity. Give yourself no reason to stop working, this will make staying on course easier.
Setting yourself up with an attainable goal is a strategy that has served me well. Don’t give yourself an hour to write 3000 words edited, polished, and ready to publish. Look at the time you have and set a goal that is actually possible to accomplish. You know what is realistic, so set your goals accordingly.
Reward yourself
I like to plow through my work and then take on the next day's work with the time I have left. I’m not most people, though.
In this case, what you can do is reward yourself for crushing the project, or getting all your work done quicker than you’d planned. Only you know what would motivate you to conquer whichever task you have on the go, and if having a reward at the end of a project serves to motivate you then by all means go for it!
There are times that I gift myself an hour of gaming for conquering a project not so much as a motivator but as a way to reset my brain before I head to bed far too late to get up far too early.
Parting Thought
These are just five strategies for setting yourself up to have an efficient distraction-free timeframe to get your work done. I know they work for me because I use them almost daily and as I finish these last few lines, I am coming to the end of a very productive hour of hammering on the keyboard that was totally devoid of distraction. Aside from our crazy chocolate lab wandering around the house sighing very loudly, annoyed by my disturbing his quiet with my loud typing.