I'm the queen of distractions. If I see an email notification come through, I have to stop what I'm doing and check it. My phone lights up with a text? Ooh, someone wants to talk to me! (Nope, just AT&T letting me know my autopay has successfully processed.) I spent a lot of 2018 trying to figure out what I can do to make my workdays more productive. It's still very much a work in progress, but I found six primary behavior changes that helped me be more productive when I'm on the clock.
- I turned off push notifications. About six months ago, I turned off all push notifications for social media. The result was an immediate increase in focus on my work. I used to pick up my phone every time it would light up, and inevitably I'd get distracted and begin scrolling through Facebook or Twitter. Next thing I know, a half hour has gone by. I strongly recommend trialing disabling push notifications for a short period of time and see if it makes a difference in your productivity.
- All of my emails flow through SaneBox first. SaneBox is an incredibly useful tool that automatically filters your email so you're only getting notified about the important things that need to be addressed. You can train your email as well so the system gets smarter over time. On a busy week, I now only get notifications for about 75% of my emails, and just get a digest at the end of the day to let me know I have other emails to check. Plans start as low as $7/mo.
- I don't take meetings on Fridays anymore. That's my "me" day. I'm on Slack and I'm still checking my email, but meetings either need to happen before Friday or will have to wait until the next week. This gives me a full 8 hours of (mostly) uninterrupted time to get work done.
- I take breaks when I need them. Everyone needs a brain break. Developers especially need a brain break. We tend to get so caught up in attempting to solve an issue that we try and try and try until something hopefully works. 90% of time if I come back to a problem with a fresh mind after taking a 15-minute break, I can develop a solution or at least make progress towards one.
- I'm learning that nothing is really that urgent. If it's not written down, it's not getting done. You know how it goes: you start your workday expecting to get A, B, and C done, but throughout the day G, H, I, and J present themselves, and by the time you get to the end of your workday you have barely even started on A. I'm getting better at accepting that not everything is urgent. If it's not on fire, it can probably wait until tomorrow.
- I don't answer unscheduled phone calls. I know this doesn't work for everyone, and I know others are not going to agree with me here. But I have strong feelings towards phone calls in that if you don't shoot me an email or message on Slack to ask if we can have a quick phone call and instead call me outright, you value your time over my own. I'm probably busy doing something (hopefully) important, and picking up the phone will not only distract me from whatever it is I was working on but also throw me off my game after the call ends, and I'll need to regroup and figure out where I left off. Be kind and schedule calls.
What are your tricks to having a more productive workday?
Top comments (22)
I love these! It's been really great seeing your tips on Twitter and I am going to try to implement some of these into my day!
Here's a few things I've been doing (I am thinking about my own blog post about my own productivity flow)
I second the pomodoro technique. I use an app called Bear Focus Timer that is excellent!
Mine are quite simple :
I have deleted my facebook account since one year now.
I switch off my smartphone from 9am-5pm so no WhatsApp distraction or social media in working hours and keep it out of reach of my hands during that time.
I drink a lot of water while working so that I can go to the toilet every one hour, it helps me to relax.
Always have my headphone even if I'm not listening to music.
I'm using Habitlab plugin to track the time I spend on websites. I have set it up to not allow me to spend more than 5 minutes on Twitter
Of course, disabling my notifications
Headphones without music - the same for me. It helps me to isolate and focus. Larger headphones = stronger "he is busy right now" in others minds :D
I love the toilet break concept!
Headphone without music thing - definitelly agree, works for me as well :)
I adopted several techniques of 'deep work' pretty succesfully:
Really useful, thanks!
I disabled all push notifications on my phone, laptop and iPad in February 2018. Was probably the best decision that I made last year, from a work and personal perspective.
Usually, at work, I stick myself on Do Not Disturb on Skype/Teams etc, to avoid people interrupting my flow with a call/IM. They can email me, but DNS status mutes all email notifications, which is nice.
Thanks for introducing me to Sane Box. Currently setting it up!
Frankly, I need to print that on a poster and plaster it on my office wall.
I'm able to keep emails under control with a pretty simple policy: I star anything that needs to be read or addressed sometime reasonably soon, and anything unworthy of that just gets marked as read (for unimportant things I'll revisit eventually) or deleted outright. I spend relatively little time on emails this way...which is amazing, considering I maintain seven active addresses, each with a dedicated purpose.
Also, I do not own a smartphone, nor do I have plans to ever do so. I limit social media websites during work hours via LeechBlock.
Now if I can just figure out how to balance Freenode IRC (the online epicenter of my professional networking) and work time, I'll be golden. Most of the time, I don't sign in if I plan on focusing.
I've been trying to do #4 more. One technique was to use pomodoro (25m of focus, 5m break), but I found it sometimes interrupted my flow when I was making a lot of progress. I've since tried to develop the skill to recognize when I've gone too deep into an issue and take a step back, but I've been finding that to be a hard skill to develop.
I'm also starting to take #5 to heart. If something non-urgent comes up, I write it down somewhere to follow up later at some dedicated time and continue with whatever I was in the middle of doing.
I've already done some equivalent of the others, except #3; I can't get away with that one. Though maybe Wednesdays...
Great list! I'll also sometimes set an away status and relocate to a quiet space when I need to dedicate a lot of focus to something.
These are awesome, awesome tips!
I'm glad I'm not alone in this struggle. I recently deleted all social media from my phone and that has really reduced the number of hours I spend on my phone daily. That was my major distraction. Great tips btw!
This was the exact step I took this year to help my developmental rate. Deleting all social media (except Twitter of coz) was the best thing for me and I don't think i will be needing them back anytime soon either.
Great tips, I think in my case the most important one is the turn off the social media notification, I improve (no my productivity) my focus.
Some times we confuse this two points, maybe I we don't have problems with distractions, we just can not focus are I am right?.
So you basically learned to say no or stop whenever you feel it's needed, I think it's a smart and sort of healthy approach. Have you tried productivity tools? I've actually discovered they can be helpful :) My favorite one is Kanban Tool ( kanbantool.com/ ), it helps me a lot.