⁠What do you do when you need to get focused and concentrate?

laptop

⁠What do you do when you need to get focused and concentrate? I tie up my hair. Oh yes, when I tie up my hair, it means I’m ready to do some serious work. I’ve been doing this since my high school days. If I had a test on a particular day, I’d leave the house with my hair tied up in a pony tail. No, it’s not some superstition. There’s actually a pretty practical reason. It’s because I don’t want to be distracted by the hair falling on my face when I’m focusing on my test. And I don’t want to be unnervingly playing with my hair either.⁠

The point is when you need to accomplish something and accomplish it well, make distractions invisible. ⁠

I’m grateful for my mobile phone and I get a lot of work done on it. It’s one my most important productivity tools. At the same time, however, it can become quite a distraction to productivity. This is why I turn off my phone notification sounds for most of the day. I’m the first to confess that I get so easily distracted. So, I have to train myself to not immediately respond to my notifications. A simple solution of putting in physically away from me helps. And I’m getting better at choosing to spend time in batches to browse, comment and reply. It is really hard though since I enjoy connecting with people like you all on social media! 😄⁠

Minimizing distractions helps me get into the flow state and stay there longer. You may have heard of the flow state when you are really productive and good work is flowing out of you. Distractions like a ding 🔔on your phone stop the flow.⁠

I talked about “energy management” a couple of posts ago. And that applies here too. When you’re distracted by something that’s making you unproductive, you are able to spend less energy on doing good work. ⁠

So how can you make your distractions invisible? While it may sound like you are restricting yourself, minimizing your distractions is so freeing. It feels good to produce good work! And the freedom to do so without distractions is a real joy. What things distracted you from doing good work this week?