Reduce self-distraction

We can’t talk about improving focus without addressing self-distraction. You can turn off notifications, put on headphones, and leave your cell phone in a different room. But none of that can prevent you from distracting yourself. Ultimately, you have to control where you place your attention, and that can be insidiously challenging.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about how maintaining flow is about finding the sweet spot between boredom and anxiety. If a task is too easy, our minds wander or get bored. It’s easier for them to get sidetracked and enable self-distraction. On the other hand, if a task is too ambitious or difficult, we can get overwhelmed and opt for a less intensive task.

Get to know your triggers

The key to reducing self-distraction is understanding your triggers in these situations. What makes your mind wander? What makes you give up and switch tasks? As I’m writing this in Dropbox Paper, Paper is suffering from degraded performance and connectivity issues. The reliability issues keep breaking my flow and set me up for self-distraction. So I might be better served using a local writing tool, but then when I share with the team for collaboration, I have to manually migrate things into Dropbox. That wouldn’t be a great use of time, so I have to choose what poses the least risk to productivity.

Willpower is finite, and the more effort you have put towards resisting self-distraction, the more difficult it will be. If you can nip it in the bud to prevent your mind from being pulled away, you’ll be able to save that precious willpower to focus on your real work. While friction can hinder productivity by making important tasks more difficult, you can also use friction to make self-distraction less convenient as well.

For the first step to understanding self-distraction, you need to clearly define work that is productive and work that isn’t productive, and then you need to become conscious of when you’re doing which type of work. Simple, right? Not really. Like anything, there are shades of grey in what’s productive, and it’s often challenging to be acutely aware of what type of work you’re doing at any given moment. We’re also not great at estimating our own productivity.

If you’re working in your text editor or IDE, that’s a safe bet that you’re being productive because as a developer that’s the primary way that you create. What about checking email? Well, it depends, but since email is at least a step or two from actually creating anything, it’s a safe bet that it’s not entirely productive. If you’re helping a colleague get unblocked, then it’s still productive, but it’s not as productive as directly creating.

What about Twitter? If you only follow other developers and are focused primarily on learning, then it’s somewhat productive. However, if it’s not contributing directly to your current goal, then it’s likely not as productive. Maybe it’s a wash—not quite unproductive but not directly productive either. If your goal is learning and you only browse Twitter once a day while having your morning coffee, then that’s reasonably productive. If your habit is to turn to Twitter when you’re overwhelmed and need a break, that can turn into a significant distraction.

So you’ll need to think about the applications that you use and sites that you visit on a daily basis and make an honest assessment with yourself about how well they contribute to (or detract from) your productivity.

Monitor yourself

The best way I’ve found to accurately track my focus over the course of a day is to use Rescuetime. You install it, and it automatically monitors which sites and applications you use the most and then tracks that information to give you a pulse on your productivity. You can adjust where a given app or site fits on a range from “Very Productive” to “Very Distracting” so Rescuetime can show you a collective productivity number. It also helps shed light on other trends and patterns so you have a better understanding of how you work.

One of the ways Rescuetime can really help you increase your awareness is by providing a daily pulse. You can get a visual breakdown of how productive you are throughout your day. You can start to understand that maybe your focus increases more as the day goes on. Or you may notice that you spend more time on distracting work near lunchtime. The better you understand these patterns, the more likely you can take steps to manage them.

Once you have a solid definition of your productivity compared to busy work, you can start to find ways to reduce self-distraction and improve the amount of productive time you have. Then the best next step is to become more aware of your triggers that may hurt productivity. Do you switch to Twitter or Facebook later in the day as you’re more fatigued? Maybe you could begin recognizing that moment and go for a short walk instead. Maybe grabbing coffee with a teammate could help re-energize you instead.

When we’re overwhelmed, uncertain, or even bored, it’s easy to let our mind pull us towards something easier. When you’re running into a wall with your current task and not sure how to break out, do you check email instead of reaching out for help? Instead, could you switch to a tangentially related task to give your brain a break but keep your brain working in the same family of problems? Could you break an overwhelming or ambiguous task into more approachable pieces? If you have long-running build processes, could you find productive tasks to fill that time and keep you focused instead of checking email or social media?

In my case, I keep a 20-minute hourglass on my desk. If I feel like I’m starting to drift long before a break is due, I’ll flip it and force myself to spend the time organizing my thoughts and thinking of how else I could approach the task. If, at the end of the 20 minutes, I haven’t worked my way back into the zone, I’ve at least laid the groundwork for returning to the task after a short break.

Make changes that encourage focus

Once you understand your triggers and habits, you can begin to implement some changes to help with focus. If you find that you turn to social media or email too frequently, you can explicitly log out when you’re done so that there’s just a little more friction to open them up when you’re tempted to self-distract. Or you could use an application like FocusMe or Focus to lock out distracting applications and websites and turn off notifications.

If you find that your mind wanders towards interesting and productive ideas making it difficult to focus on your current task, you can spend some time enabling a way to capture those thoughts with as few keystrokes as possible. Or keep a notepad and pen handy at all times. This ensures that you feel comfortable that you can come back to the idea later without breaking the flow you have with your current task. For example, OmniFocus has a way to quickly record tasks for processing later, but it requires too many keystrokes and some mouse usage. A workflow in Alfred can make it faster to record ideas without taking your hands off of the keyboard.

Intuition can cut both ways. Your best ideas might occur to you in the shower, but trivial ideas and tasks may also occur to you while you’re trying to focus. By finding a way to get these ideas out of your head with as little effort as possible, you’re enabling yourself to stay in the zone longer.

Another great tactic to mitigate self-distraction is to find opportunities to work analog. Instead of banging on a keyboard, turn to pencil (or pen) and paper to think through ideas and make plans. Our devices are all natural distraction generators, but a pad of paper won’t ever interrupt you with a notification. Going analog also has the added bonus of helping you think a little differently and could help generate ideas that you wouldn’t have generated sitting at your computer.

Self-distraction is one of the most challenging types of distraction because you can’t shut your brain off when you’re working. Instead, you have to strive to understand how your brain works and what causes it to wander or become tired. Then, take steps to reduce the occurrences of those kinds of challenges.

Your next steps

1. Learn your self-distraction triggers and habits.
2. Log out of distracting sites after visiting in order to create distraction friction upon returning.
3. Create a lightning quick way to record ideas without breaking concentration on your current work.
4. Go analog. Notebooks don’t notify you.
5. Use distraction-blocking tools like Focus or FocusMe.
6. Be mindful of when your current task is boring, and find ways to make the work more engaging.
7. Be mindful of when your current task is overwhelming, and try to break it down into less anxiety-inducing bite-size tasks.
8. Don’t keep your cell phone on your desk.