4 Ways to Outsmart the Smart Devices and Take Charge of Your Focus Time!

You sit down to do the focus work and just got into the zone when you hear, BUZZ!! It’s not a bee 🐝, but it’s the Internet distracting you from getting stuff done.

The buzzing you hear can be on your smartphone, smartwatch, or an icon jumping on your menu bar. The buzz is killing your BUZZ!!

It’s such a big problem that companies are building numerous tools to prevent people from getting distracted. “Helping people” (air quotes) to get down to do the focus work. But all such tools require additional setup, which is a distraction in itself. So what do you do?

Here are few tricks I use to kill the buzz’ness every day.

• Uninstall all the desktop apps like Slack, Notion, Twitter, iMessage, or anything that’s jumpy. The notification causes them to jump. All these apps have an equivalently better browser experience.

• Smother your smartphones: by putting them below a pillow (when WFH) or in the bag (when in office).

• Dumb-ify the smartwatch: Smartwatches have timers, a heart rate monitor, walking tracker. If you want to continue using them but not get distracted, switch on airplane mode otherwise smother them too.

• Unplug the Internet: Duh!!! Easy to say but hard to do. I have a keyboard shortcut to turn off Wifi. It’s three continuous spacebar taps.

The first two days are a struggle. But when you see the productivity soar, you will be amazed how much work gets done in focused time.

What if there is an emergency? It’s a possibility. Leave your phone number where people can reach you. The keyword is “People.”

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I tweet about software engineering, productivity, mental models, and personal development, and some witty programming humor 😁.