Let’s play a game. Whilst reading this post, keep a tally of how many incoming notifications you receive that require your attention in any way. Include social media notifications, incoming emails from any and all accounts, text messages, phone calls and even conversations that get started by people around you. Even if you don’t do this literally, I think it’s clear to see how many distractions can pop up during our day. I’ve purposefully kept Facebook and my main email account open whilst writing this introduction, I’ve had 17 different notifications pop up as a result. Even if I don’t deal with them immediately, the simple fact that I took my mind of my main task, has caused it to take much longer and that’s just with two of my accounts open; which is why I’m closing those tabs down now. Let’s talk about how this is impacting our productivity.
Photo Credit: Allef Vinicius @ Unsplash
Do these distractions really matter that much? Don’t they make the day more bearable with very little effect other than maybe a bit of wasted time? Well, that kind of depends on how much you value your time and how well you want to accomplish your chosen task. A study from the University of California Irvine shows that distractions “cause you to completely shift your thinking and it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task”. I urge you to time it, it seems absolutely far fetched, but if you keep track of how long it takes you to complete ONE task plus distractions and compare it to that same task minus distractions, it might just shock you.
Do you know what the most bizzare thing is?
We’ve been programmed to think that the world will come crashing down if we don’t check every beep and buzz. We’ll miss that important job opportunity, we’ll not be involved in the next social gathering, we won’t be IN on the new meme. None of that is true, at least, it doesn’t have to be. You could break most distractions down into three different types:
- Urgent: e.g. A family member is in hospital.
- Needs some sort of reply: e.g. Work emails, social invitations, bills to pay
- Complete and utter pointless crap that is just taking up valuable time: e.g. The colour shirt you’re wearing and the second letter in your surname will tell you some unimportant or untrue fact about yourself, tag two friends or else you’ll get bad luck.
Let’s focus on the most important of these distractions, those that could be deemed urgent. How often do they actually happen? Unless we’re currently going through a crisis we’re already aware of that requires our ongoing attention, it’s unlikely they happen that often. Are there ways we can block all incoming calls for a period of time, but allow certain numbers to still get through? Of course there are, we’ll be looking at specific apps and services for various scenarios in an upcoming article, but if this is precisely what you’re after I would recommend checking out the app, YouMail and reading our article, 5 Tools to Increase Productivity and Save Time on Almost any Project. The point being, should you be allowing an onslaught of distractions to be holding you back, just in case there’s an emergency? Absolutely not.
What about the biggest chunk of distractions?
Those that require some kind of reply, either because they are work related or because you actually want to reply to them. These are the distractions that steal our energy, drain our time and make us moan continuously about how distracted we are or; even better; how annoying other people are for interrupting us at such an inconvenient time. Here’s a question for you. What happens if every time someone messages you, they get an automatic reply that says, “Sorry, I’m busy, I will check this tonight and get back to you then”? The chances are if you view replying to incoming notifications as a separate task that gets batched into one, with no distractions, it will get done quicker and help every other task you’ve done that day too. Once you start putting this into practice you might notice that some of those notifications only need sorting once a week or once a month, they were stealing your precious time, when actually, getting them done quicker had no positive effect whatsoever. The best thing about batch checking notifications is that it allows you to spot the worst kind of distraction at a glance and avoid them stealing any of your time.
I’m referring to all the crap that we get notified about, the spam email that beeped and we checked hoping it was a reply to our pitch email, the friend notification from someone we don’t know and have no plan on adding, the debt consolidation call that always comes at an inopportune time. Why are we allowing these pointless things to distract us from valuable tasks that will either earn us money, further our goals or simply make us happy? There is absolute no need to and the quicker we realise, the quicker we can start being productive and achieving things we never thought possible.
If this subject interests you we definitely recommend reading Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week and keeping an eye on our page, we’ve got lots of great hints and tips on the way that will help you increase your productivity, become location independent and further your business.
Co-founder @kitschinc and @wearefoodscouts. Musician and spoken word artist🎸@larkhilluk & Chicharrero. Podcast Host and Producer: Promote The Hell Out Of It!
