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As you know, I’ve been asking everyone on [The Fight Spot newsletter](https://shawnblanc.net/newsletter/) what their biggest challenge is regarding focus.
By far and away, one of the most common themes is dealing with distractions.
I’m going to tackle this issue on an upcoming Fight Spot newsletter as well, but wanted to talk about it on Shawn Today first.
## Dealing with Distractions
Distractions come from the outside. Such as interruptions and notifications. People tap you on the shoulder, your kids barge in to your office, your email program dings, your phone rings, you get a new Facebook message, someone liked your photo on Instagram, there’s a new private message in Slack, someone just commented on your blog.
And distractions come from within, compelling us to go check something or keeping us from being able to focus on the task at hand.
* Fear of missing out
* Fear of being interrupted
* Inbox addiction
* Feeling uninspired
Dealing with distractions is a skill.
Start by wrangling as many of the external distractions as you can.
* When you’re trying to focus, turn off anything that might buzz, beep, ding, or otherwise interrupt you. Close your email program, close Slack, close Twitter, close your RSS reader.
* Put your Mac and your iPhone and your iPad on Do Not Disturb mode.
* Close any software programs and windows that you don’t need right now.
* Turn off push notifications for as many apps as you can. I don’t get notified when people reply to me on Twitter or when they like my photos on Instagram or when they comment on my blog. I don’t get notifications for every Slack update. I don’t get notifications for new emails either.
* Now you might have to deal with in-office distractions and interruptions. Put on headphones. Put a sticky note on the back of your chair that says you’re working on something important and please don’t interrupt until a certain time.
When I was the marketing director, we had an open work space with 17 people and it was a productive environment. We were all on instant messenger, but if someone’s status was set to “away” it meant they were focused on a project and didn’t want to be interrupted. And nobody was allowed to just go tap on someone’s shoulder, they had to ping them on IM first (even if that person was literally sitting at the desk next to them). And we didn’t talk in the room — you had to go out into the hallway or the conference room, so that your conversation didn’t interrupt others.
If your boss is the one always interrupting you, talk to them. Ask them if they could consider a different way to communicate with you.
If you work from home, lock the door and put on headphones. Ask your spouse to keep a honey-do list or a conversation topic list instead of texting you throughout the day.
# Dealing with the distractions that come from within
* **Fear of missing out**? Set notifications for important keywords, VIPs, etc. Follow less people on Twitter. Set up a Twitter list of VIPs. Try to define what exactly the worst-case scenario would be if you DID miss out on something? Is it an irrecoverable scenario?
* **Fear of being interrupted**: if you’re trying to get into the zone, but can feel in the back of your mind that at any moment someone is going to come barging in to your office, it can be hard to focus. As I mentioned above, take the same precautions against actual interruptions to help you calm your fear of being interrupted.
* **Inbox addiction**: This is a real addiction. And just like any other addiction (gambling, drinking, etc.) it’s not easy to break. Fortunately this addiction isn’t detrimental to our lives, but it *is* detrimental to doing our best creative work.
I’m not going to get in to how to break inbox addiction here, but there are a lot of guides and articles about changing habits and breaking addictions.
* **Feeling uninspired**: when we sit down to do the work, sometimes we can’t focus because we don’t know what to write about or we don’t have any ideas for a design we’re trying to put together. Instead of turning to a distraction (twitter, YouTube, email, etc), turn to an alternative source of inspiration. Take a walk, go to a different work environment, read a chapter in your favorite book, etc. This will train your mind that a lack of inspiration does not get rewarded with junk-food distractions.
* **Short attention span**: It used to be that I couldn’t write for longer than about 10 minutes before my mind wanted to wonder over to something else. So I began setting a timer for 30 minutes and I didn’t allow myself to do any other tasks but write. If I couldn’t think of what to say then I had to just sit there with the blank page and cursor.
When I feel that tug to go check something, the key is not to give in. Instead, acknowledge it, breathe, and get back to what I was working on. Over time, you build an endurance.
Over time — it only took me a week or two — I built up my endurance for writing. Now, it’s been just a month since I began writing for 30 minutes, and now I regularly write for about 2-3 hours every morning. Today I’ve written 1,700 words already.
* **Pomodoro technique**: this can help with the attention span. You do short sprints of work, with short breaks,then short sprints, then a longer break.
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At the end of the day, the key to beating distractions is to take inventory of what the most common distractions are and then take steps to remove that distraction (by turning off push notifications) or build up an immunity to it (by not allowing yourself to casually check email when you’re trying to write).