How To Stay Productive & Avoid Distractions

We've all been there.

You're in a state of flow. Your keyboard is on fire. You're smashing through feature after feature.

Suddenly, something happens. You need to hop on a call or your phone buzzes with a pointless notification. Now you're distracted. You're out of it. You've lost your concentration and you just can't get it back.

Let's chat about the 5 most common disruptions to our concentrations and how we can best avoid letting them disrupt us from writing awesome code.

Let’s dive in.

Mitigate Meetings

Meetings are the single most deadly threats to your productivity. For multiple reasons:

• The majority of meetings are too long
• The majority of meetings are pointless
• Meetings are generally sprinkled throughout your day

You can't avoid meetings but you can take action to help have them provide more value in the same or less amount of time.

If you can, audit your calendar. Make these adjustments:

• Batch meetings to be one after another instead of throughout the day
• Remove meetings that could rather be just an email or a quick screen recording
• Shorten the length of your meetings. Parkinson's Law states that the work expands to fill the allocated time. If you lessen the time allocated for your meetings, you'll find that you achieve the same amount.

Control Your Environment

Your environment has a serious impact on your output.

If you're in an office, invest in a decent pair of headphones that can help block out surrounding sounds when you need to focus. Let your team know that if your headphones are on then you're in a focus session. Also, if you can, try to sit facing a wall. Not having movements in your peripherals or past the monitor that you give your attention to helps in ensuring you don't get distracted by those around you.

If you're at home, a pair of noise-cancelling headphones would also do you some good but there are other measures that you can take. Set up a dedicated workstation, like an office, that allows for you to separate out your work life from your home life. A closed door or some other indicator to those that you live with will help in letting them know that you're currently busy writing some top notch code.

Prioritize Messages

Whether you're using Slack, Microsoft Teams or Discord for your team communications, it poses a threat to your productivity. Messages from team members or groups can easily take you away from your focus.

Don't respond to messages as they come in unless they're critical. Rather wait to wrap up whatever you're working on and then spend time responding to all the conversations in bulk.

Mute Notifications

Simple. Obvious. Effective.

Mute notifications when you need to focus or set up that notifications are automatically muted at specific times during the day.

This goes for all your devices. Phones, laptops, tablets and your working machine. Anything that is visible or audible that has the potential to distract you should be muted until needed.

Avoid Cognitive Fatigue

Last but definitely not least - avoid losing focus and productivity because you're feeling tired.

We all know that slump we start to feel after a couple of hours of working. This is why most people are productive for the first few hours of the day but generally don't get much done in the latter half.

Break your day down into segments instead of viewing it as one long session.

Work for 2 hours. Grab a snack. Work for 2 hours. Take a quick nap or go for a walk around the block.

A change of scenery or activity will reactivate your brain and release natural chemicals that will increase your energy levels and help avoid feeling the crash.

Hopefully you find these helpful and are able to introduce them into your daily routine to help maximize your output and mitigate distractions.

See you again next week.

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