How to Stop Procrastinating and Live in a Distraction-Free World
Don’t let your ambitions become smudged by the digital world.
We’ve all been there — you wake up with a relatively quiet schedule, with many blank spaces to crack on with your key priorities. But before you know it, today’s to-dos are shoved to tomorrow, projects are put-off, and things just simply aren’t done.
The frantic digital world invades both our working and leisurely time, leaving us little time to actually breathe.
There are many times when getting certain things done feels right or when checking through your phone feels productive. But here’s the thing: nobody procrastinates after work. What does this tell you about how important those activities were?
Let’s take a look at how you can win back your time and beat the time-stealing beast of the digital world.
The Great Division
One of the most problematic things for time management is the migration of everyday activities onto laptops and work devices.
The digital world is constructed for our convenience. We can stock up on items without having to leave the door. Tickets can be booked. Tables can be reserved. Journeys can be planned.
But things become less convenient when considering a hidden threat: we can do too much on our devices, and this inevitably affects our productivity.
Whilst working, it is ridiculously easy to open a new tab into endless possibilities. Our laptops become a universal hub where we can venture into almost any domain, whether that be checking messages, reviewing finances or organising the weekend.
Many web browsers have the clever but devilish feature of displaying your recently viewed pages as you type making such distractions even easier to grasp. (Yes, you can turn these features off and I strongly recommend it.)
An antidote to settle this chaos of your life scattered around your desktop is the ability to create new desktops. This can be done on Windows by accessing the timeline [Windows + Tab] but can also be done on Mac devices. With this feature, you can easily implement distinct workspaces for both work and play.
We all have times where we need tabs left open, most likely if we need to finish looking at something later. But rather than letting these tabs nag at our attention throughout the day, you may wish to have a dedicated ‘admin’ desktop — a separate space where you can finish buying a product or organise your weekend. With this, your work environment exists purely for work, getting rid of those unwanted tangents during focussed time slots.
Change the environment
Physical space also plays an important role in dividing work and leisure time. Managing your environment will optimise brain health and ensure a healthy workflow.
If you’ve just finished a work session in your room, try going downstairs to the living room to check your phone or browse the news. This isn’t just to highlight the risks of sitting for prolonged periods; having a separate space for different types of activities helps your brain in forming associations that affect your mind frame in those spaces. Think about how your brain drifts off if you lie in bed (even during the day.)
Have dedicated spaces for work and relaxation and you’ll see your mind easily tuning in to the task at hand.
A Deviceless Mind Is A Peaceful One
I’m not going to state the obvious here. Mobiles and deep work are not a great match-we know this. But the true concern is when our phones catch us off-guard. This is done in such a way that we unintentionally fill out our time through the day then realise why we’re left with none.
- Think of the last time you had a creative spike — an idea, say, or flow of solutions to a problem. Was your phone involved?
There’s a 99% chance the answer will be no. Great ideas in the mind don’t come about when scrolling — the best ideas come in times of peace and quiet.
This explains those sudden bursts of ideas on long walks.
Mobiles provide an unhealthy environment for both passive and active work. Scrolling social media is a purely passive activity — you are not doing anything. The same applies to more than half the instances you check your emails without taking any form of action.
For active work, mobiles neatly present the illusion of getting many (unimportant) tasks done. Our priorities become distorted when we view 101 apps littered across our app drawers. The sheer quantity itself is not only to blame here; accessibility is equally damaging. ‘Recently used apps’ headers and push notifications bring distractions up to the surface. They instantly present us with things that may not necessarily be relevant in the current moment.
Falsely Busy
Without going too in-depth on the theory, we can technically be ‘busy’ at any point we choose — at any given moment, there will always be something we could choose to get done regardless of whether it’s important or not.
Take this imaginary scenario in your daily life:
You remember that your room needs vacuuming. But, as you vacuum, you are reminded that the bookshelf in the corner of your room needs fixing. Whilst fixing your shelf, you see a wallet of admin files propped up by the side which you haven’t touched in a while with sheets that need attending.
As you’re away on this venture, the fact you have two assignments due soon and have done 0% of your intended work today hits you like a bus.
This is one of many instances that demonstrates how we can falsely occupy ourselves with so-called important tasks. We have more agency over which types of tasks we get done in a day than we realise. But it is not difficult for one to fall into a trance of being constantly busy, exposed to this distortion of priorities.
Mobiles help to bolster this dangerous habit, making crucial wind-down time slots even harder to reach. Left-open apps act like floaters in our headspace reminding us there are things to do and people to reply to. Before even starting a task, we can be reminded and distracted by other irrelevant tasks primed by the magnetising features intrinsic to mobile apps.
Win Back Your Attention
Luckily, there are a handful of apps that help win back some of our attention. HelpMeFocus allows you to set up multiple profiles each tuned to block out certain applications (and their notifications) for specific time periods. You can also manually toggle these profiles on and off.
After some productive time spent without pings, buzzes and bleeps, you can then access your compiled notifications and process them all at once.
Going offline once in a while is an even better idea, but in today’s functioning world this poses a challenge with our heavy reliance on devices. Nonetheless, putting your phone into a drawer for a few hours or realising the train doesn’t have Wi-Fi both have hidden benefits that may unlock some of your unknown creative powers.
Give your mind the proper environment to rest and work and step away from the chaotic digital world now and again.
Take Control
Whether you feel it or not, you have more control over your time than you believe. We can easily give particular tasks a false sense of urgency — their irrelevancy only strikes us later. Our devices help wrap us up in this illusion but limit your devices, and you’ll get much more done. Become more aware of your time online and watch a new productive life unfold in front of you.
