The 10 Best Ways to Overcome Distractions
Distractions are the №1 problem preventing us from doing the things we know we should be doing. Here we will see the best strategies on how to overcome distractions and thereby become more focused and more productive.
We are getting distracted, when we are checking our Instagram account instead of writing our report, when we are watching YouTube videos instead of learning for an exam, and when we are checking emails instead of finishing our financial planning. If situations similar to the above are happening to you on a regular basis, you are not alone. In fact, the majority of knowledge workers, especially those working remotely, report distractions as their №1 problem preventing them from getting things done.
Distractions are very difficult to deal with. Here we show why this is the case:
Though distractions are a huge problem for most knowledge workers, there are a few strategies that can help you. Strategies that I have been using myself in order to go from low productivity due to a constantly distracted brain, to high productivity that keeps distraction at bay.
These are the top 10 strategies:
- Analyse your distractions
- Take on more challenging work
- Limit distractions of email
- Limit distraction of social media and messaging apps
- Distraction scheduling
- Working with a pair worker
- Working with a productivity coach
- Planning in Goal Pyramids
- Working in Focus Cycles
- Using a project management system
1. Analyse Your Distractions
The first thing to get a grip on your distractions is to analyse them:
● How often do you get distracted?
● How much time are you spending on different websites?
● What are the causes of your distractions?
● What are the social media and websites that are getting you most distracted?
Reflecting on the above questions helps you find out what causes your most important distractions. This knowledge helps you in designing a strategy to prevent those distractions and increases your self awareness, so that you are less likely to succumb to those distractions in the future.
2. Take On More Challenging Work
If you’re having trouble focusing and are constantly distracted, it may be that your work isn’t engaging you fully. You might feel like you’re working hard all day, but it could be that your mind is fighting boredom and looking to fill the time with something more interesting.
If that is the case, you should consider making a change in your job or in your career.
3. Limit Distractions of Email
Most of us have to spend a considerable amount of time each day communicating via email. This is not a bad thing, communication is essential and email is an efficient way to communicate. The problem with email is that many of us are getting distracted during important work by the desire to check the inbox and then spending too much time on unimportant emails.
To fight email distractions, these are our top strategies:
- Schedule emailing
- Use Unroll.me to limit the amount of emails you receive
- Strive for email inbox 0
3.1. Schedule emailing
First, you should schedule a time for checking your emails and limit it to no more than thrice a day. For example, after your morning routine and in the evening after you are done with work. This prevents you from getting sucked into email distractions during the day.
3.2. Use Unroll.me to limit the amount of emails you receive
Second, you want to drastically reduce the amount of email you receive into your inbox. For this purpose I am using Unroll.me. Unroll.me lets you classify all the senders that have ever sent you any email into three categories:
- Keep in inbox
- Unsubscribe
- Put into the Unroll daily mail
When I started using Unroll.me, I had over 2,500 email senders that were sending me emails. From some of those senders I unsubscribed, as they were of no use. Other senders I kept in my inbox as they were close contacts or could be sending important emails.
However, to the vast majority of senders I neither unsubscribed nor did I give them access to my inbox. Instead I decided to put them into the daily Unroll.me email, a useful tool that combines all emails I receive during the day in one single email, which is sent to me daily.
In my case, this Unroll.me email will generally have almost 100 individual emails combined into one single email. This might seem like a lot, but in fact it takes me only a few minutes each day to go over all my emails.
3.3. Strive for email inbox 0
You always want to strive for inbox 0, which means that every day, or at least once per week, you should try to get all of the emails you received either archived or classified, so that there are no non-processed emails in your inbox.
In my experience, the best way to do this is to have a very simple classification system, which only takes less than a second to process.
I use these simple categories to classify my emails:
● Emails in inbox
● Archived emails
● Starred emails
Every day I get many emails into my inbox. At least once a day, I get all of those out of my inbox by either archiving the email or putting a star on it. A star means that the email requires me to take action, or that there is some urgent and important information in it, such as a flight ticket.
This is a very basic email classification, but because it is so basic it is very quick to classify my emails.
4. Limit Distractions of Social Media and Messaging Apps
Social media, including sites like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, as well as messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal are the number one distractors for the majority of people.
There are three main methods to limit these distractions:
- Delete the apps
- Block the apps
- Turn off the notifications from these apps
4.1. Delete the apps
Deleting the apps is the most radical method. It means deleting the app from your phone so that you are no longer able to access it. This however also means that you lose the benefit it offers. For example, if you delete WhatsApp, as it is a source of too much distraction, you will also lose the ability to communicate with important contacts via the app.
4.2. Block the apps
An approach less radical than deleting is just to block the app for some time period. You can completely block these apps after a certain maximum time of daily usage or you can block them during certain hours of the day.
You could either set up a time limit for daily app usage, for example 10 minutes per day, or you could limit the app usage to only a certain time of the day, for example between 18:00 and 20:00.
This blocking you can either do directly on your phone or you can use apps for that.
4.3. Turn off the notifications from these apps
Deleting and blocking the apps can be a bit too radical for many people. This is especially true for messaging apps which often do contain messages to which we should respond more frequently than only once per day.
So if you do not want to block these apps, the next thing to prevent distractions is to turn off the notifications of these apps.
For example, when I turned off notifications on all apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Email and Facebook, I noticed how much the frequency of usage decreased. I would still check every 2 hours or so, to see if I got anything important, however, I would not be constantly looking at the apps every single time I got a notification.
5. Schedule Distractions
A few years ago I was addicted to news, which meant that I would be consuming news for more than an hour a day and pretty much check the latest news every hour. This was extremely damaging to my productivity. Therefore, I decided to go cold turkey on the news. For several weeks I did not get any new information about politics, sport events or celebrity news. So I thought this was working out quite well for me. But then came a major sporting event, the football World Cup. Thus, I felt like I could make an exception, and while I was not watching any games I was following the scores of my favorite teams online. But as I had made this small exception from no longer consuming news, I then started to just watch 5 minutes of general news. And these 5 minutes became 10 and then 15 and finally 30 minutes. Very soon I no longer was limiting my news consumption.
So I again was struggling with my news addiction, until I found a solution that worked for me and has continued to work ever since. With this solution I have been able to get distractions under control and thus be more productive.
The solution is to give myself the freedom to consume news, but within specific limitations: only at fixed time slots of 15 minutes each during the day:
● 10 am — 10:15 am
● 1 pm — 1:15 pm
● 4 pm — 4:15 pm
● 7 pm — 7:15 pm.
I call it distraction scheduling, as I put all potential distraction into these specific time periods of 15 minutes. Before and afterwards distractions are completely prohibited, but during those 15 minutes any distraction is permitted.
6. Work With a Pair Worker
An extremely effective way to limit distraction, which still few people know about, is called Working in Pairs. Working in pairs means that instead of working alone, you work with one other person that sees everything you do and is able to help you in anything you work on.
When you are working in pairs and you are sharing your computer screen with your pair, you will automatically focus only on work related tasks, and all distractions as well as interruptions, become less of a problem. For example, you will not go to Instagram or Facebook to check the latest updates from friends. Also, when a person calls you on the phone, you will most likely tell that person that you are on another call and continue working with your pair.
You can read more about working in pairs here:
7. Work With a Productivity Coach
Another method of reducing distractions is working with a productivity coach. A productivity coach will work with you one-on-one, just like your pair worker, but she will not do so continuously, but rather on a weekly basis, making sure to:
● Plan your week
● Review your weekly accomplishments
● Point you to the discrepancies between your planned and actually accomplished tasks
● Analyze with you ways to improve your productivity
Most importantly, your personal productivity coach will hold you accountable to your tasks and projects, helping you to overcome distractions and procrastination, whilst ensuring you to keep motivated and to achieve your full potential.
You can read more about the benefits of having a personal productivity coach here:
8. Plan With Goal Pyramids
Another important strategy to reduce distractions, which is rarely mentioned, is planning with goal pyramids. Goal pyramids are a set of goals from high to low level, including the following:
● Missions
● Projects
● Tasks
● Subtasks
Your mission splits into your projects, your projects into tasks, your tasks into subtasks.
Such a goal pyramid helps you avoid two pitfalls that often lead to distraction:
- Having a big goal but not knowing which steps need to be taken to accomplish it.
- Knowing the actionable task you should do, but not having the big vision behind it.
If you always keep in mind your top level goals, but at the same time also have clarity on the action steps to be done, you will be super motivated and thus be less drawn to distractions.
You can read more about working with goal pyramids here:
9. Work in Focus Cycles
Related to planning with goal pyramids is another strategy for limiting distractions that is called working in Focus Cycles. A focus cycle is a period of intense work preceded by a planning session and ended by a review session.
Working in focus cycles thus means that you start your work by a planning session, then you only focus on the execution of work, followed by a quick review of your work, and ended by a break before the next focus cycle starts.
We can visualize focus cycles as follows:
Focus cycles should be made at different time horizons from long term to short term:
● Annual focus cycle
● Monthly focus cycle
● Weekly focus cycle
● Daily focus cycle
You can learn more about working in Focus Cycles here:
The most important part of working in focus cycles is the weekly plan and daily task list. The weekly plan focuses on the most important objectives for the week. Once you have clarity on what exactly needs to be accomplished during the week you are much less likely to get distracted.
You can read more about the importance of weekly planning here:
Similarly, once you know exactly what you want to accomplish during the day you are much less likely to get distracted.
You can read more about the importance of daily task lists here:
10. Use a Project Management System
I first started using a project management system in 2008. Before I had been using just pen and paper to make a monthly plan and a daily task list. Those work plans were extremely useful, but once I started using a project management system I saw my productivity skyrocket and my distractions become less frequent. This has to do with the fact that I constantly knew what the most important tasks were, and thus was constantly motivated to get more things done.
However, I quickly noticed that in order to become even more productive I need to plan in goal pyramids and work in focus cycles, as discussed above. But planning with goal pyramids and working in focus cycles was either difficult or not possible with all the project management systems I was trying out. So in 2019 I decided to just develop a project management system that would take all my knowledge and experience into account. We launched this in 2021 and it is by far the best system to make any knowledge worker not only more productive but also less distracted.
Workiamo is a very simple tool that is ideal for anybody that wants to be less stressed and more productive. As you are reading this, we let you access it for lifetime for free! In order to do so, you have to register at www.workiamo.com by entering this code: ILOVEWORK.
