How to Avoid Distraction
by Scott on June 27, 2006
To avoid distraction – schedule it. To avoid being distracted by something during your workday, make the distraction itself a task to be completed that day. Do this regularly and your mind will stay “on task” because you know there will be time later to spend on whatever is distracting you.
For me, the major distraction is web browsing. With the wild world web at our fingertips, it is too easy to get distracted by an interesting tidbit that you find when looking up what version of mySQL is currently recommended by and for the RoR crowd. Browsing is not bad – in fact you need to feed your intelligence and creativity and most of the links that spawn from your initial source of needed information provide a good diet of technical, creative, humorous, and business information. What is bad is the loss of productivity that results from the urge to continue to follow links of interest. It is not that browsing is junk food. The problem is that when you are trying to complete a task is not the time to eat any type of “food”.
Before you stop reading and write this off as the former Fortune 25 manager in me talking like a productivity zealot let me clarify that this is not a managers’ call to “stop goofing off and work harder”. This is relevant to you for two reasons.
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