Productivity has always been a buzzword in every workplace. How do you stay productive at work and create a system to set aside distractions? Find out in this video.
In this video, Peter shared tips and strategies on how to avoid distractions at work.
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Transcription:
What’s up, guys? Pete Moriarty here, and I’ve just wrapped up a crazy amount of travel, running, training, and doing our quarterly planning session with my team. I wanted to talk to you about avoiding distractions at work, something that’s super-duper important and something that was super important for me as I was working on my quarterly plan with my team. What we do is once a quarter we sit in a room and we work on strategies to grow and improve the business. We work on customer feedback, and we look at, okay, what are we gonna work on for the next quarter and how is that gonna fit into our yearly goals?
It’s super important any time you’re working during the day in the business day you’re not interrupted. If you’re interrupted once it can take up to half an hour to sometimes even 40 minutes for you to get back into the flow of business. And you wanna be doing that deep work, right? We wanna be doing that nice, well-adjusted and focused on work, which is gonna be our best work. But to do that we need to avoid distractions. I’ve got some tips for you here, and I’m gonna run through these one by one and help you out on making sure that you can keep nice and well, make sure that you can keep nice and well in your zone, let’s call it. Called.
Number one. Disabling notifications. This is probably the most important one and you can start with your mobile phone by switching off all notifications that you’ve got there. And when you switch off notifications on your phone, something funny happens. You start using it less and less, which is great. So I pretty much leave mine on do not disturb for most of the day. I’ve tweaked the settings a little bit so phone calls can come through from important people. But pretty much it stays on silent for the rest of the day, which means that I only use my phone when I actually wanna work on it.
The latest version of IOS, with Apples new phones, and Google just announced the Pixel 3 as well. All have features to monitor how much time you’re spending using your phone. And on Android, I actually just downloaded an app called Quality Time which sends me a push notification every day and it tells me how many minutes I spent on my phone the day before and how many times I unlocked it and what I was actually doing when I used my phone. I love that, because it’s a great little bit of feedback on how much screen time I’m actually spending on my phone.
Another pro tip that you can do to cut down on distractions from your phone is actually switch in your accessibility settings, switch the whole phone to black and white. My whole phone is actually on black and white mode, so you can see here it’s in gray scale, which is a bit weird. What that does is it reduces the amount of dopamine and cortisol that you get each time that you pick up your phone and you work on it. It basically makes it a bit boring and uninteresting, which is great because I want my phone to be a utility rather than a plaything, basically.
All right. Cool. So that’s number one. Number two. You wanna make sure that you switch off all notifications on your computer as well. So that means email popups, dings, buzzers, instant messages. All of those, kill them. What that’s gonna do is that’s going to, hopefully, help you focus on the task at hand and not drag you out of that task and into something that someone else is gonna popup and annoy you with.
With things like managing email, if you’ve read The 4-Hour Workweek, you would know that Tim Ferriss recommends having a scheduled time to jump in and check your emails, and we teach that as well as part of our inbox intensive course. For you, you should be doing that with anything in your business, whether it’s chat, whether it’s checking your online banking, whether it’s checking any of those other time wasting apps like news websites that you like to go to. You should be choosing when to use those, not have them pop up and ding. So all notifications, kill them. Get rid of them. You can jump on your settings on your phone and completely disable them.
Okay. Number two. Schedule do not disturb time. So if you still wanna receive maybe text messages during the day and you still need to receive phone calls on your mobile, that’s fine. But I would recommend considering using the do not disturb schedule. And what do not disturb does, is it effectively completely blanks out your phone. That’s a really nice feature. It’s on IOS and on Android. If you go under settings, you can actually schedule this. I schedule mine from 7:00 p.m. til 7:00 a.m. So basically during those hours, my phone won’t make a peep. Of course I can check it. I can click a button or I can pick it up and it’s gonna show me if there’s any notifications on the screen. But basically after hours I don’t need to be bothered with any emergencies and I don’t really want my phone buzzing, interrupting my family and my personal time. So number two tip is to schedule some do not disturb time. It’s gonna make sure that you are kept non-interrupted by your phone.
All right. Number three. This is a cool one. Bit ironic, since I’m streaming on Facebook, but that’s okay. There’s a Facebook plugin called kill the newsfeed. And it’s in the Chrome store so it works on Mac and PC, and what that does is it actually kills the Facebook newsfeed. Now I don’t use Facebook on my mobile phone. I recommend deleting it from your mobile phone, but you’re probably gonna wanna check in on your computer from time to time.
This little plugin, and I’ll put a link to it right below, allows you to actually receive notifications, post in groups, and do everything that you wanna do on Facebook. If someone tags you, you’ll see a notification and you can respond. That’s all cool. But it disables the newsfeed. You don’t have that ability to endless scroll through Facebook. You miss out on any of the ads. If someone tags you and something important, you’re still gonna see that, but basically it stops you from that endless time wasting scrolling of Facebook. I highly, highly recommend that. I’ve been using that for a couple of years now and it completely kills off the newsfeed so it gets rid of that addictive quality without you completely isolating yourself from friends and updates and family and other people who might wanna be working on Facebook.
Number four. This is for the addicts. If you are already an addict. If you have that news site that you go to or maybe it’s reddit.com or maybe it’s Facebook or maybe it’s your internet banking to look at how much money is or isn’t in your bank account. If you are an addict of something on the internet, well, you can use a plugin on your Chrome browser to actually block websites. It forces you to have an on-off switch before you go to that website and before you’re able to actually access it.
I use this if I find myself procrastinating and going back to a certain website or two to kind of waste time and keep myself busy rather than focusing on the task at hand. And so yeah, this plugin is wonderful. You can just switch it on and off. There’s varying levels of difficulty to disable it when you wanna access those sites again. But you can choose those when you set it up. What I’ll do is, I’ll pop a link down below.
All right. We’ve done site block and plugin. We’ve done Facebook kill the newsfeed. Okay, cool. Number five. This is one of my favorites. If you have an Android phone and this is one of the killer features of Android. Unfortunately not yet on IOS. And you’re using G Suite. Well, with G Suite you can set up something called Android for Work. And what Android for Work does, is it actually sets up a kind of separate, let’s say, a sandpit for all of your business apps. So the business apps are in a separate container from all of your personal apps. If you have a look on mine here so you can see up the top row, my business apps all have a little briefcase next to them. So those business apps there are all of my work apps. All of my personal apps are separate to those.
With one button I just slide down from the top and I bring up my tools trade. I can click on a little briefcase and what that does is it actually turns off work mode. And it disables all of my work apps. Now I really love that, because it means no notifications. I’m not tempted to open up my email. I have to put in my pin code to actually disable that once I’ve switched off work mode. And that’s really brilliant if I wanna have a switch off weekend.
My team, if there’s an emergency, of course they can give me a call on the mobile if they really need to get in touch with me. But if I don’t wanna tempt myself to jump into any one of those business apps, just to check email over the weekend or just to check my notifications in instant messaging. I can completely kill all of those by switching off work mode. Unfortunately that one is Android only, but a great feature of Android for Work.
Anyway, I hope these tips have been useful. And I hope that you can be just that little bit more productive with all of these. They’re, of course, very useful and a big part of being productive is making sure that you have the right apps. So if you have, for example, 10 different apps that you’re using for all different things in business, if you’re using WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger for messaging your team, or maybe you’re still using text messages or phone calls, or right now if you’re using your mobile phone for absolutely everything and you’d like to get off your mobile phone, then you might consider working with some of the tools that we provide. One of those is G Suite, so the suite of Google applications, which helps you get everything done online from any device at any time. Another application that we provide is called Dial Pad. That is a Cloud-based business phone system which lets you take your business phone with you wherever you are on the mobile, which is pretty cool.
Until next time, take care guys, and any questions, just pop them along down below there. We’ve got a question from Lauren that’s come through. Why are your apps black and white? Lauren, you must have come in a little bit late on the video, but that’s cool. Happy to recover it. If you jump into your settings on your mobile phone and switch in the accessibility settings, switch all your apps to, well you can switch the whole phone to black and white. What that does is it reduces the dopamine response when you use your mobile phone. And it helps you to use your phone as a utility rather than as a plaything that’s gonna get you addicted and keep you wanting to come back for more. I find that after I switched all of my apps, my whole phone, to black and white, I jump in and then I jump out. I use my phone for whatever I need to and then I stop using my phone. It doesn’t actually give me any pleasure or excitement to use it with all the pretty colors.
App developers know that phones are addictive. They know the apps are addictive. And they use that to their advantage. So if you wanna beat the man, then jump in your settings and switch everything over to black and white.
Anyway, until next time, take care guys. If you need any help, or you would like to get in touch with our team, head along to itGenius.com and we’ll be more than happy to help. Take care.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
