Distraction

One of the things that I constantly try to get better at is not getting distracted. Yes, I can get easily distracted. Not in a worrying sense but still.

For example, if I’m in a room where there is a television playing while having a conversation with somebody, sooner or later I will start looking at the moving images on screen. Nothing to worry about, but still not very polite for the person I’m having a chat with.

Luckily I’m well aware of my flaw, Which means I can put mechanisms in place to improve. In the example of the playing television, if possible I try to sit with my back to the screen.

Productivity killer

Distraction can be a productivity killer. In my case it is not too bad, but yet I want to be as productive as possible. Needless to say that in my work I want to remove distraction triggers as much as I can. One of the biggest ones for me are notifications. Think Outlook, Skype, Slack, all the social medias; that kind of stuff. If not strictly needed I will switch off notifications completely, or at least go into the settings of any app and tweak the notification settings to my liking. Of course , these ones below always get a block from me:

Distracted by your wrist

Having a smart-watch is not good in relation to distraction. Sure, once I got myself one it was great to be able to get notified on your watch, without having to look at your phone. But I have switched that off for a while now and it has been a blessing.Today, in my continuous effort to cut distractions I’ve now switched off the last bit of attention-grabbing from my wrist; the fitness tracking. So no more stand reminders 10 minutes to the hour while I’m in full flow of coding. No more “you still need to burn xx calories to reach your daily goal” while I’m driving.

Lets see how it goes. Probably I won’t miss it a bit!

This post is part of a series of articles about “What I Have Learned Today”; acknowledging every day the thing I have learned. Feel free to read the other posts. all opinions in this article are my own and not necessarily represent the views of my employer.