Avoiding Distractions

Distractions are plentiful and unlikely to go away any time soon. It’s best to be prepared to face distractions when you’re trying to get things done, so here are a few quick tips for you:

• Turn your phone to airplane mode to prevent web surfing or distracting notifications
• seed your task list with one or two necessary yet simple and quick tasks. This can help you start up and keep decent momentum going through your work.
• If you must listen to music, find something that you will not sing along to and can easily tune out. Ambient noise apps or websites might even help you out more by drowning out distracting sounds yet not providing catchy vocals to sing to.
  • Silence can be a powerful tool as well. I typically start my work with some upbeat electronic music and just let my playlist run through the same 100 songs I’ve been listening to for years. Once I get annoyed by the music, I turn it off and let the silence keep me focused.
• Change locations once one place becomes too distracting for you. Be careful with this one, though. If you switch places too often, you’ll spend far too much time walking from place to place. I always set a minimum amount of time spent or tasks completed in a location before I permit myself to relocate.
• Wake up early. If you’re up on time, you’ll be awake before all of the day’s distractions. Your friends are likely still asleep, there won’t be new articles on your favourite sites, no one will have posted anything new, and it’s so beautifully quiet.
• Keep your Wi-Fi off. You can still use your laptop for your work, but whenever you’re doing work out of the house you keep yourself disconnected.
• Keep your electronics at home. This may simply be too impractical for most days, but if you really need to focus on a particular task that does not require a computer, it might be worth leaving your electronics alone and doing things the old fashioned way.