Limiting Your Daily Distractions

A few months ago I had the feeling I was being distracted too much to get things accomplished. I hated the feeling of having accomplished nothing all day. The first thing I ask my daughter when I come home is, “What did you learn today?” But, due to daily distractions, I felt I personally had not had my daily dose of learning.

In order to get more productive I began limiting my daily distractions. A few of the tricks had to do with a process I started to follow and others were simple hacks which either trained my mind or my environment from distracting me.

By limiting the amount of daily distractions I received I heightened my personal productivity. If you don’t think you are distracted on a frequent basis check this out.

The University of California at Irvine did research on workplace interruptions and found the average amount of time people spent on a single event before being interrupted or distracted was three minutes and five seconds.

Three minutes and five seconds. What can you expect to get done in this short period of time?

Setup an Uninterrupted Block of Time

Open up your calender and schedule a 1 hour meeting every day with yourself. Block this time out and don’t schedule anything in this block of time. If your most important client calls you and says it is the only time they have to talk in the next 4 weeks. Schedule a meeting with them 5 weeks from now.

This time is reserved for you to get your most important items done. The single thing which is keeping you up at night. This block is for solving the problems which keep hounding you. Use this time effectively and treat it with respect.

I have found the best time to have this block of time is from noon to 1. I take my lunch early at 11 am and then come back and get a solid block of time when everyone else is at lunch. I have also experimented with waking up a few hours earlier and having the uninterrupted block first thing in the morning.

Get a block of time scheduled which works for you and stick with it.

Limiting Email

I guarantee your biggest daily distraction is email. Loughborough University discovered discovered people allow themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently by email as telephone calls. Even though people can recover from email faster than a phone call the way email is handled has been shown to give more interruption than expected.

Tim Ferris is a huge advocate of limiting how often you consume your email to once or twice a day. I have personally found the Dr. Pepper method to work pretty well. This limits your email consumption to 10am, 2pm, and 4pm.

Planned Interruptions

I love the concept of office hours. Rather than having an open door policy. Shut and lock your door. Turn off the lights. Make it look like you aren’t even in the office to get more accomplished.

Make yourself completely unavailable to anyone. Then, at the same time everyday, open your door for two hours. These are your office hours. Anyone can talk to you about anything.

The trick to doing this is being consistent about it. Always open your door at the same time and close it for the rest of the time. After about a month of “being hardcore” about it, people will begin to fall into a pattern and will start following the laws you are laying down.

30-minute meetings

In my entire professional career, I have only been to a few one-hour meetings which actually needed the full hour. You can free up a lot of time by limiting your meetings to 30-minutes.

The first step to doing this is changing your calender preferences. Setup your default meeting time to be 30-minutes rather than an hour. If someone suggests you make the meeting an hour to accommodate for more discussion respond by saying if at the end of the meeting we feel like we need more time, we can schedule another 30-minute block of time.

I understand this won’t work in all situations. Sometimes a client wants to meet for an hour or you are meeting someone who normally isn’t available, such as a CEO or out-of-towner. Limit the majority of your meetings to 30-minutes. You will thank me.

Headphones

Developers in the valley love wearing headphones. There are discussions on hackernews and blog posts by startups about which headphones are the best to use. To developers headphones are just as important as the monitor and monitor setups we use.

Even if you aren’t a developer, you can benefit from wearing headphones at work. The act of wearing headphones is enough to deter people away from talking to you. 90% of the time when I am wearing headphones, I am not even listening to music.

Prioritize

Although avoiding daily distractions can help you be more productive. It is still important to emphasize priorities. I carry around a notebook with me filled with to-do lists. I don’t like keeping this list in digital format due to the distraction of it being digital. I am more likely to open something else up after I use the digital to-do list.

Before I choose a task I read the full list and understand what is my highest priority item and don’t do anything else until finishing that one task.

What techniques and methods do you use to avoid daily distractions?