In today’s digital age, where technology plays an increasingly central role in our lives, maintaining focus and productivity can be a challenging endeavor. Those looking to maximize their productivity and minimize distractions in the digital world, should strive to gain the advantages technologies give us while staying in charge of them.
Managing our devices and online interactions is essential for maintaining focus, productivity, and a healthy work-life balance.
Below I walk you through insights and practical strategies to help you take control of your tech usage.
Keep unnecessary tech away
Nowadays we tech devices are all around us at our homes. We have multiple shared devices (like TV, PS/Xbox, Amazon Alexa, etc.) and multiple personal devices (e.g. computer, tablet, smartphone, portable gaming device). They play a significant role in modern life. We just need to define their role before they trick us into defining it.
As for shared devices my approach is very basic. Just keep them in shared spaces.
This leads to using them only there. And since shared spaces are not meant to be used for any kind of focused activities, those devices cannot distract you while you’re working on anything requiring your focus. In general I find this being enough, although in our family we have one very strict rule. That is no screen time for kids until lunch (this includes both shared devices and their personal devices).
Personal devices are a bit trickier. They are small and portable. Therefore they tend to follow us.
We need to be intentional about how we use device and when we should have access to it. I guess the most common situation would be using desktop or laptop mostly for work and personal projects, tablet mostly for entertainment, and on smartphone mixing every possible scenario.
My approach is to designate a parking lot for every device. This creates an order and a proper mindset.
I store my iPad in a cabinet drawer and take it out only when I need it. It never floats on my table or in random places. My laptop is always on my desk. When I want or need to work from other place, I put it back on the desk once I’m done. My iPhone’s parking lot is in the corner of my table (not ideal, but at least I put it in the way that I can’t see its screen while working on laptop). When I take it with me to the other room, if I don’t use it then I tend to put in the opposite part of that room.
Control your notifications
When our tech peacefully lies in their parking lots, notifications are the evils who test our willpower. Since it’s too hard to resist checking what’s going on, the best option is to minimize notifications.
My rule of thumb when installing new app is don’t allow notifications. In existing apps I set notifications to the bare minimum. Basically I allow notifications and sounds only in three circumstance: chat with family members, on-line banking, and calendar. You need to define your boundaries, i.e. the reasons why you can be interrupted in a the middle of deep work. Anything that is not allowed to interrupt deep work, shouldn’t be allowed to interrupt you at any time. At the end of the day all those notifications are just attention eaters leading to time wasting.
One more thing are badges on the apps. I treat them a bit lighter compared to notifications because they don’t actively break my focus. On the other hand seeing a number on the badge creates temptation to open the app and take a look what’s happening. So I minimize them as well. For example, in mail app I turn badge off and have dedicated time to check mail, in chat apps I allow counter only for direct messages and check group chats periodically.
Set boundaries for online communication
Let me tell a story which shaped my view on online communication. Many years ago when online chats and video calls were just starting being a thing, I changed my job and joined the company which was actively using chat instead of emails inside of the team. It turned out that they use same chat app I was using personally. So I just shared my contact and things started rolling. I had this app on my computer at work, on my laptop at home, and on my smartphone. During first few months as I was getting up to speed everything went just fine. Then I started to realize that I’m spending too much time in work-related chats in the evenings. On one hand it was only 10-15 minutes. On the other hand it was happening almost every evening and it was interrupting my family and self time. What I did is I talked about the problem and my solution with teammates and direct manager, created a separate account, connected with everyone at work using that account, removed connections from my personal account, and most important used this new account only on my work computer.
The moral is to set communication boundaries. Leave your work-related communication channels at work. Keep your personal communication channels on your smartphone as a most convenient single device.
I know this sounds too strict. Life is not back and while. It has lots of grey zones. Luckily enough covering those grey zones is pretty easy.
It’s fine to have your work mail app or chat app installed on personal smartphone. Just make sure to turn off all notifications, hide those apps deep so that you need multiple taps to open them, and use them as your one way communication line when you need to inform someone about emergency situation causing you to be late, miss a meetings, etc.
It’s no brainer if you do same with your personal communication channels. For example, I have chat apps used in the family not only on iPhone, but also on laptop. They are just not running there. Whenever it’s more convenient to download something to laptop or share something from it, I open the app, do the action, and close it. Btw, I have no communication apps on iPad because, being pure entertainment device, it perfectly falls into black and white picture.
Control the ease of access to time wasters
Willpower is not an endless resource. It’s easy to use it all quickly and start following whatever grabs your attention.
When you unlock your phone, tablet, or computer first thing you see is home screen. If it “screams” at you with a bunch of icons, it grabs your attention no matter what was your original intention.
It’s vital to keep it clean. Have only essential apps visible on home screen on the phone or tablet and empty desktop on computer. The cleaner it is, the less a chance of being derailed, loose focus, and fall into non-desirable behaviors.
Unfortunately having clean home screen is not enough. Technology gives us many shortcuts to stimulate our bad habits. Just swipe down on unlocked iPhone and start typing “you”. It doesn’t matter how deep had you pushed YouTube app down your screens on iPhone, you can easily open it. Same is true for web sites. They are just few taps or clicks away.
If you have a problem controlling when and what apps and sites you use dragging you down the rabbit hole of unintended content consumption, you should try out services which allow to block access. For example, onesec on iPhone slows down how other apps start which gives you a moment to reconsider if it’s actually good time to use that app. Services like Freedom can block access to certain sites or completely put you offline at predefined times.
Technology was invented to make our lives simpler. Unfortunately currently it became the tool to grab and keep our attention. Without deliberate efforts to stay focused, now it’s easier than ever to get sucked into activities and entertainments which they provide us. We have sort-term satisfaction, but in long-term, we fill unfulfilled and overwhelmed.