🥾 Give workplace distractions the boot 👉🚪

6 practical things you can do today to limit workplace distractions, and take back control of your focus & productivity.

Craig Johnson
Nov 6 · 7 min read

Below are a couple of things that have helped me combat the flurry of incoming distractions each day, so I can keep on top of the important stuff.

Contents:

  1. Slack notifications
  2. Calendar ownership
  3. Time-sink tabs
  4. Keep a clean desk
  5. Hide the dock
  6. User manuals

1. Slack notifications

Straight off the bat, let’s start with the number one focus vampire — Slack 🧛🏻‍♀️

Slack is a great way to stay connected to your colleagues, especially when working in remote teams or in offices with multiple floors/buildings.

But, how often have you been deep in thought, and then…

Poof… 👀

💨 There goes your focus.

Some roles may require an immediate response to urgent incidents, like DevOps, Ops or HR. For everyone else — TURN OFF SLACK ALERTS 🚨

The sky isn’t falling, messages can wait, everything will be fine. Believe 🙏

I can’t actually fathom how anyone gets any focused work done with banner notifications turned on — it’s a direct, visual and audible interruption 🤮

Therefore, I have all banner notifications for Slack turned off, as well as the pinging sound notifications.

I’m also very picky over what other apps can send me notifications. Any app that requests permission to send notifications is denied by default. I think one of the few I do have on right now is the calendar meeting reminder 10mins before a meeting is scheduled to start.

In some cases, I simply don’t even have Slack open at all until my allocated Check Email+Slack calendar slot, but more on that later.


2. Calendar ownership

Slack is a vital tool to rein in in order to focus at work. Equally as important, is taking back control of your time ⏰

Define your working hours.

If you’re using Google Calendar, there is a helpful setting (pictured below) which notifies colleagues when they’re scheduling meetings outside of those hours. Any meetings proposed outside this time frame mark as not attending.

30 or 50 minute meetings. No more no less.

If a meeting is less than 30 minutes, did it really require a meeting, or could it have been done asynchronously? Any longer than 50 minutes and attention spans are waning.

Make use of the speedy meetings feature (pictured below).

Back to back meetings can be a common workplace reality. Check this setting to reduce that ~2–3min lateness which seems so prevalent in meeting room culture, and to accommodate for slight overhangs and bathroom breaks!

Set meetings guidelines.

Demand a well-written description and agenda for every meeting. If in the end, you do need to opt for this time consuming, synchronous facetime event, everyone is crystal clear what they’re trying to solve during this time, and everything can stay on track 🏃‍♀️

Block your time

And finally, the most beneficial thing I’ve done to my calendar in the last few months. Time blocking 🚫

It’s important to be an active participant of whatever team you’re a part of, and join in those common rituals like critiques, retrospectives and daily standups, but it’s equally important to take control of your time.

Be strict with your time, it’s precious. The discussions in so many meetings do not demand synchronous conversation.

Opt for asynchronous communication whenever you can. Say no to meetings by default.

Here’s how my baseline calendar looks like before additional, non-ritual meetings, 1–1s and designer syncs are added.

My calendar “empty state”

All the yellow parts pictured above, are slots I’ve blocked out for my own, focused work time. Any meeting scheduled within this time I propose a new time for, request async followup, or decline. Whenever possible, I try to cluster meetings together, to reduce those useless 30–60 minutes breaks between meetings.

The blue parts are team rituals, like daily standups and sprint planning, grooming and retrospective.

And, as I alluded to previously, there are some reminders in there each day to Check Email/Slack. When I have notifications and Slack all turned off, these act as prompts for me to open and check those channels periodically, but at the same time, safeguards me from checking them constantly throughout the day.


3. Time-sink tabs

How many times have you seen a browser window like this?

No deal 🙅

In combination with the Check Email/Slack reminders in the calendar above, pinning time-sink tabs away can dramatically reduce the temptation to constantly check them. Gmail, calendar, twitter and notes are my main culprits — they’re my time-sink tabs.

Hide them pinned tabs away

Leave tabs such as these pinned in one window, and then minimise that window into the dock or hide the window away somewhere. For any other browser windows you need for work right now, open a new, distraction-free window 🎉


4. Keep a clean desk

This is what my desktop looks like

Have you ever seen someone's desktop and it’s a minefield of numerous images and docs splayed every which way? This is the sort of organisation (or lack thereof) that wakes me in the night in a cold sweat 😱

I’ve got fn+F1 as a shortcut mapped to reveal my desktop, which I use a lot throughout the day as I screenshot various things. The idea behind keeping a clean desktop is to minimise visual clutter, so each time I switch to it, I can find what I’m looking for quickly, and distractions are limited.

With a clear space like this, I might place the one .sketch or .doc file I’ll use for the day there, and everything else is organised within subfolders of that folder ‘One’ 📂


5. Hide the dock

This is what my dock looks like when it is visible

If your dock is always visible, you increase the temptation to check an app via that oh-so-desireable little red notification dot 🔴

Instead of having a dock of apps always visible, my dock is always minimised unless I move my mouse down to expand it, and I keep no apps pinned to the dock either.

Instead, I make use of cmd +space to spotlight search and open apps as I need them.

Command + Space for spotlight search in Max OS X

6. User manuals

All the above things might help you focus yourself, but what about when a colleague comes and taps you on the shoulder? A common problem in open format offices.

When someone taps you on the shoulder while you’re in the zone at your desk, they’re not sending you a request to sync on something when you’re ready, they’ve made a decision that now is the time you’re going to stop work and address their need.

To help reduce this type of interruption, there are some visual signals you can send your team while you’re at your desk, to let them know you’re in the zone, like wearing headphones or having a Pomodoro timer on your desk.

Everyone has different expectations and ideas as to what’s appropriate for workplace interruptions. One exercise, to help the team get on the same page as one another, is to conduct a user manuals session.

A user manuals session is where everyone in the team fills out a template doc outlining some specific points regarding the way they like to work. What is the environment I like to work in? What do I love? What do I struggle with? Everyone presents their filled-in doc to the team, we ask questions and discuss 👯

The outcome of a session like this should be an awareness of our various working styles and preferences. Whether that’s an ‘open-door, question me at any time’ policy, or a ‘my headphones are on, please let me focus’ request, it’s all laid out for the team and the increased transparency helps resolve any false assumptions we may have had.

And if all else fails… retreat! 🏃

Book a meeting room or try and find a quiet spot away from your desk to work from for a while. It can be a nice change of scenery and also provide you with some interruption-free focus time ⭐️


Some of the above points are going to be really tricky for some to get on board with. I get it, it’s difficult for me too 🙏

Every workplace is different, and we all have a variety of needs and processes we’re constantly juggling with our colleagues and teams.

But every now and then, it’s good practice to take a critical look at our current workflows, reflect honestly on our state of focus and productivity, and commit to improving 💪


Hope you find these points as impactful to your focus and productivity as I have ✌️

Tweet me Craig Johnson 🍕

Images by me.

Craig Johnson

Written by

Senior Product Designer @GetYourGuide ✈️, previously @Hotjar 🔥

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