Get rid of distractions

February 12, 2008

Over the last couple of days I’ve noticed that there have been a lot of things that call for my attention when I’m writing. Or doing anything important, for that matter. And every time I’d given my attention to it, and I went back to what I was doing, I had to take a couple of seconds to see where I left off. Sometimes it takes a couple of seconds more to remember what the next thing, I was going to say or do, was.

Get rid of them…

… while you’re doing something important. Don’t delete your chat accounts, but just turn them off when you need to concentrate. And turning off is better than setting your status to “unavailable”. I tried setting my MSN to “Appear offline” once. The funny thing was that no one was talking to me, but I was looking at all the notifications of people coming online, one by one! Then I may even feel the urge to click on one of those notifications if it’s someone to whom I’ve not spoken for a while.

These distractions include:

Chats
Twitter
New Mail Notifications of unimportant accounts
Feed readers with notifications
Websites that have popup notifications, even if the website is not in focus
And the list goes on…

Whatever it is that is not important and not urgent, get rid of it while you need to concentrate.

… but not all of them!

Different people have different circumstances. I have read somewhere online that it’s best to turn off everything, including your mail client, when you need to concentrate. For me that would not work.

I run a small hosting company which provides services to small (and some not so small) businesses and individuals in Suriname. It’s extremely important for me to be notified whenever there is something wrong with the servers or if one of my customers has urgent problems. I need to be able to limit downtime to a minimum, and without those notifications, I cannot do that.

So I leave my mail client running, with notifications enabled for the most important accounts. The rest of the notifications I will see whenever I’m done. If people need me urgently, and they don’t see me in the chat, they will send me an email. And they usually don’t, because it is usually not THAT urgent.

The right environment

It is important to try out some different working environments on your computer to see where you can concentrate the best. Right now, I’m experimenting with using my laptop with nothing but a text editor and an empty browser. This seems to work nicely.

Next, I’ll experiment with different surroundings, which is content for a different post. I won’t have you waiting too long for this one: I’ll write about it tomorrow.