Increase Your Focus and Productivity by Getting the Buzz out of Your Head
A simple hack to eliminate the distraction of small but necessary tasks and minimize context-switching
Distractions are the enemy of progress. We all know that.
Yet how hard is it to actually remove them?
It’s hard enough to keep our eyes off our phones for an entire hour, left alone keep our minds from jumping from one thought to another when we’re trying to focus on a task.
You know, those things you have to get done but are not urgent and just take up space in your head for weeks until you finally get to tackle them?
Here’s a simple strategy not to let them spoil your deep work hours or your groundedness in the present moment.
The Buzzing Enemies of Your Focus: Mosquito Tasks
You’re finally in front of your laptop ready to write for 60 amazing minutes, when you suddenly remember that you have a doctor’s appointment to make. You stop what you’re doing and call the doctor’s secretary.
Or you’re in the middle of enjoying some 1:1 special time with your kid, and that bill to pay pops into your mind. You can’t tackle that right now so you’ll brain will make sure this keeps popping into your head over and over until it’s taken care of.
Wait! I was supposed to send an email to my accountant to let them know my change of address. Maybe I can just do it now and come back to writing this story later, it’ll only take a moment…
Content creator Amanda Goetz calls these annoying non-urgent but necessary to-dos “mosquito tasks”. They buzz around your head and force you to switch context constantly, stopping what you’re doing to do something else or — at the very least — interrupt your flow and ability to stay in the present moment.
Getting rid of them is quite simple (and very liberating).
Your New Productivity Ally: The Mosquito Task List
- Create a list on your notes app and call it whatever you want
(Amanda calls it “Power Hour”, and I call it “Miscellaneous”). - Every time one of these mandatory things you have to get done pops up in your head, simply write it down on your list.
- Schedule a certain time block in your week to knock off as many of these as you can. Saturday afternoons work best for me, as these are mostly things that I can do online and from my phone while nap-trapped in bed with my son.
The benefits:
- You free up cognitive space in your brain. The tasks are there, safe on your list and you can finally allow yourself to stop thinking about them.
- You get more productive at dealing with small tasks — batching things is almost always a great idea and you’ll notice that it’s much faster to deal with small stuff in sequence rather than doing a bit of something here and a bit of something else there.
- You minimize context-switching. It’s estimated that people take on average 9.5 minutes to get back into a productive modality after switching between tasks. Training yourself not to worry about mosquito tasks away from their scheduled time block is a way for you to remain focused on the activity at hand for longer.
Simple, isn’t it?
Also incredibly effective.
Give it a try and you’ll notice an increase in your productivity and focus, as well as in your ability not to get overwhelmed by the dozens of small things we have to get done in our day-to-day.
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