I don’t know about you but I have the attention span of a goldfish if I’m not making a conscious effort. I spend a lot of time flipping through LinkedIn or Instagram on my phone. If you can work to remove the micro-distractions in your life you will start to feel a sense of space in your busy life.
A few approaches I’ve taken to reduce the number of distractions in my daily life so I can think more.
- Turn off notifications
- Between email, social media, text messages and breaking new alerts there are a lot of platforms vying for your already limited attention. Even at work I’ve disabled my outlook email notifications. There are very few reasons you need to know immediately when an emails hits your inbox or grandma posts something new on Facebook (sorry Nanny).
- Uninstall distracting phone apps
- Taking this a step further, I uninstalled the top apps I found myself mindless checking when I got bored. My phone has been Facebook free for ~2 years and Snapchat free for ~6 months. Now this didn’t cure me of compulsively checking social media as I now frequent Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter in their place. I’m even refreshing YouTube. But it’s the right step to take and when I hit Publish on this post I’ll uninstall LinkedIn to slowly free up time.
- Walk the dog
- This is probably my top 3 activities I look forward to everyday especially when I leave my phone at home. Getting outside and talking to my dog is a great to spend time distraction free. Really living in the moment and picking up dog poo. I can either return home with a new sense of clarity or have over thought a minor issue but either way to I’m learning and exploring my mind caves.
- Read more
- Reading gives you more stimulus and ideas to think about. Whether its fiction or non-fiction, get the cobwebs off your brains shelves and put some new ideas in there. I’m about halfway through the Steve Jobs biography and I use my dog walks to think about how I can apply his story to my life. I also like to read Consultant Mind for his POV on life.
- Decline more meetings
- I read that Warren Buffett spends most of his day thinking and rarely takes meeting requests more than 2 days in advance. Your role as a manager or innovator in work or life is to figure out ways to improve it. Bouncing from meeting to meeting leaves very little time to be strategic and think through problems.
What’s one app you could uninstall today to reduce distractions?
This took me far to long to write – thanks Facebook.