Dealing with Distractions #

We live in a wonderful time where you can reach out to your teammates living on the other side of the globe within seconds. Unfortunately, that also means someone can reach out to you on a whim as well. They can’t see that you’re busy and deep into debugging a function 17 layers deep. And one interruption is enough to demolish the mental model you’re building.

It is commonly found that we need about 45 minutes to find our state of flow even after a moment’s interruption. How then do we manage our distractions?

Know your enemy #

First, we have to realize that we don’t fight distractions. We avoid them. Fighting distractions is a losing battle and you can only win by planning ahead and avoiding distractions.

Then, you have to be mindful of your time. Have you gone down a rabbit hole? Are you focusing on tangents not important to your work? Are you working on something that doesn’t help your most important goal for the day? It is difficult to guard ourselves all the time but we can do this every few minutes. When you catch yourself distracted, reassess your priorities. Ask yourself: is this helping me achieve my goals today? If not, tell yourself to take a step back and rethink your priorities.

Understand yourself #

Just as we discussed in the time management section, figure out your most productive hours and guard yourself against distractions. Ensure you don’t have meetings at the time. It’s a good idea to block your calendar for those hours so the rest of your team has clarity. There are tools that integrate Slack status with the calendar which you can use to indicate on Slack that you are not to be disturbed. If possible, quit Slack and silence your phone at this time.

Working with tools #

Slack #

Slack is our primary tool for communication and as such, it is quite noisy. Thankfully, the default notification settings have improved significantly since their earlier versions. That said, it is a good idea to further customize so that you are comfortable with the notifications you receive. We tend to over-communicate and put the responsibility of managing notifications on the receiver. This means you need to firmly manage your attention and take actions such as disabling certain notifications, muting channels, and even leaving channels when they no longer serve you.

Email #

For better or worse, we do not use email routinely. You might only receive emails for certain sensitive messages from people operations, meeting invites (most of us install the Google Calendar app on Slack for this), and other messages where there needs to be a trail. Apart from that, you may receive forwarded emails from customers and other notifications. As such, emails would be very infrequent and you do not need to check email very frequently. Of course, this depends on your project and it’s a good idea to confirm this with your project manager.

Given the sparse nature of email, do not let email notifications bother you. Remove or disable any email notification plugins in your browser or phone and check email manually twice a day.

Calendar #

Consider using Google Calendar to keep your schedule updated. Block off time for focusing on your tasks and communicate with the team that they respect your focus time when scheduling meetings. Slack app for Google Calendar is useful for handling meeting notifications and invites. Furthermore, there are apps such as Reclaim and Rise that can automatically reschedule meetings to protect your focus time. They also have other functionality to control Slack status and notifications. Consider checking them out.

Ideally, your calendar is updated to reflect your actual day and you can communicate to your team that they don’t even need to check with you to schedule a meeting. They can just put it on your calendar. This can only happen if you keep your calendar updated.