When working on the internet, as I imagine many people reading this do, it can feel like your brain is in 100 different places at once if you don’t guard your attention against these distractions.

When your thoughts are spread out over many different things, it’s hard to find a deep flow to produce your work within, leading to a reduction in the efficiency of creating a quality output.

This article is going to cover the different ways in which you can make sure that your digital environment stimulates you as little as possible so that your attention towards your work doesn’t become clouded with different things that don’t matter.

I’ll start with some tips and strategies that I believe all people could put in place for this, moving to some more extreme methods of cutting out distractions later in the article.

Let’s get started…

Do not disturb/turn off notifications

Notifications have been designed to hack your focus in the most distracting way possible, through popups, sounds, haptic feedback and more.

Every time you’re exposed to one of these notifications, your brain diverts some attention towards its content. You can choose to ignore it, but part of your brain continues to wonder about the content of the notification until you open it and see what it holds.

The only way to stop this distraction from occurring is to make sure that you receive as few notifications as possible.

Do this first by going through your phone and any other device that you use for or whilst you work. Disable every notification that isn’t completely required for you to receive.

Turn off new likes and followers notifications for social media, turn off email notifications, and turn off messenger and text notifications.

There may be a few contacts that you don’t want to miss updates from, but you can very often set up your applications so that only notifications from these priority contacts come through.

Remember that every time your brain switches task (caused by notifications), you leave some attention residue on the previous task. You want to minimise the spread of this residue as much as possible, reserving all of your brainpower for the task in front of you.

Batching and time-blocking

I was recently reading The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, who, in one chapter, talks about the power of batching your tasks together.

He uses an example of printing t-shirts — the equipment hire and labour costs mean that it takes the same amount of time and costs as much to print 3 custom t-shirts as it does 20.

This can be applied to removing distractions in our work.

Think of all the small, distracting tasks that are a necessary evil when you’re working — checking emails/silenced notifications and messages, making payments and phone calls and others. It’s more effective if you batch them together so that you do as much as you can in one period of time to make sure that these tasks don’t interrupt you throughout the majority of the time you spend working.

Check your emails once or twice per day instead of every time the open inbox tab in your browser makes a pinging noise. Respond to all your voicemails once you’ve completed your highest-priority tasks. Going further, you can do all your laundry washes on one day per week, or batch prepare your meals so that there’s less friction caused by having to get up and cook multiple times per day.

Ferriss notes that you might upset some people by not being permanently available to take calls and respond to emails. His solution is to set up an automation that instantly apologises for the unavailability and informs the sender of when they can expect a reply. By stating that it’s so you can produce higher-quality work quicker, people very often respect your choice for minimised distractions.

Time-blocking is related to batching your smaller distracting tasks. A very popular productivity technique, this is where you assign time on your calendar for you to work on different things. This holds you more accountable for how you spend your time, by making sure that you’re aware of what you should be doing at the present moment.

It takes some experimentation to get the time-blocking to a point where you feel as though you are working on the right things in the right proportions, but once you’re there, the power of habit will make sure that you’re less distracted. If you time-block periods where you can execute the tasks that you’ve batched as above, you’ll find yourself becoming worried or distracted by them less during blocks that you’ve scheduled for focused work.

I’ve started to use time-blocking myself and, paradoxically, I’m more productive than when I allowed myself free time to work on what I want. I attribute this to the fact that I’m not wasting mental energy deciding what I should do day-in-day-out.

Unsubscribing

We’re all on social media. We all receive emails.

We all follow others on social media. We all send emails.

The power of minimising distractions here comes from considering what you want to invest your time in…

What do you truly want to hear about? What actually matters to you?

I’m not saying to turn yourself into a digital hermit, but I am saying that an advert for a new TV service probably has no place hitting your inbox in the middle of your work session (or at any time). I’m also saying that learning that XYZ celebrity has a new baby with ZYX model probably isn’t going to add any value to your work or personal life, only distraction.

Unsubscribing is your friend here.

Ruthlessly cut down on the number of services that can email or text you. Unfollow people on social media who you don’t care about or who don’t provide you with significant knowledge or value. Develop a minimalist philosophy of technology use.

Learn to care less about constant updates on what’s happening in the world. I’m a massive fan of sports and the Ashes and Wimbledon are going on as I write this. I could be checking up-to-the-minute commentaries and scoreboards, but I know that my work will suffer if I do this, and I’ll enjoy watching the highlights after I’ve completed my priority tasks at the end of the day just as much as following along live.

A year ago I’d have been watching along, but I’ve cut down on distractions, and now I’m making money writing online, so this stuff really does work.

But what can you do if, after all the above, you still can’t focus?

Website/app blocking

This is the most extreme option for minimising distractions, and one I used for a while when I was addicted to dopamine hits from social media, notifications and computer games, is website and app blocking.

This technique makes it impossible to access websites and apps which are distracting and that you can’t seem to stop using.

The best solutions for this that I’ve found are Cold Turkey Blocker on a PC or a Mac, Lock Me Out on an Android device and Opal on an iPhone. All of these solutions cost money, but it’s easily worth the return in focus that you’ll get from cutting out all the distractions that are preventing your access to focused work.

They entirely block access to distractions, without workarounds. I’ve found that this is necessary for such a tool because if you’re so addicted to a distraction that you can’t control whether you open it or not, you’ll always go for the workarounds (ask me how I know).

This will be uncomfortable for you to do, but necessary — use your newfound time to go and focus on your tasks. I used to block Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, even the App Store and Medium stats just so I could focus on writing pieces to publish.

When you feel that your behaviours are under control enough to stop using tools like these, you can use browser extensions to make the sites you visit less stimulating and distracting. My favourites are Unhook for YouTube, and Minimal Twitter for Twitter. They remove things like never-ending feeds and notifications, so you can be more meaningful when using the sites.

I hope that you’ve learned something new in this piece that you can put into action, and as always, thanks for reading!