Break the virtual leash of tech distractions - 6 Tips to help you manage technology and get more important work done

 Look around you. How many tech devices are within sight? You are probably looking at one right now. Tech devices are dominating more and more of our time and, as a result, our focus. As we become more connected, it is harder and harder to disconnect and do meaningful, focus-demanding work.By some estimates, the average person who owns a cell phone spends 3 hours a day on their phone. That is 15 hours a week! As at the time of this writing, in Canada, 15 hours a week is a solid part-time job! Or a second career. Or a second degree even.And that is just cellphones. This does not account for tablets, laptops and other mobile devices.But tech is likely here to stay. It makes communication faster and information ridiculously more accessible. And, for the person who uses it right, it can be a boon to productivity. But only if you use it right. To the person less deliberate and thoughtful about how tech is affecting them, it becomes a bane not just of productivity, but of living a balanced life altogether.That is why in this article, I will give you six tips to ensure that your tech tools are not destroying your productivity at work. Let us begin.

If you can’t beat ‘em, manage ‘em

First, let us acknowledge one important fact of modern life – most of us need tech. It is not practical for most people in today’s world to completely eschew technology and virtual connectivity. Especially for work. However, we can manage when and how we interact with tech. This puts us in a place of power not weakness; a place of proactivity, not reactivity. Now for the tips.

1. Check your tech to spec

Tech distractions interrupt us because we allow them to – by being perpetually interruptible. Therefore, have a set time when you periodically check your tech for updates and respond accordingly. Once the responses are done, go off the grid again until the next set period.  The frequency of this will depend on how critical it is to your work that you remain accessible. However, from my observations, we tend to overestimate our own importance. For most people, the client is NOT going to take their business elsewhere if you don’t reply their email within 5 minutes. The project will NOT collapse if you take an hour before weighing in on an issue and the company will NOT fold if you don’t obsess over every single email you get.In general, dedicating 15 minutes every 1 to 2 hours is adequate. Adjust this to your own schedule and needs.It is hard to overstate how much of a difference this will make to your productivity and even happiness. BY doing this, you take back control and studies show that a sense of control is strongly correlated with happiness, even if it exists in a fairly small part of life. That is a lot of payback simply for scheduling tech use.Related to this, let me combine tips 2 and 3 for the next point.

2. Turn off email notifications on your desktop and 3. Turn your phone (and tablet) to silent (not vibrate) and place it face down in a secure drawer

Our brains notice a LOT more than we consciously realize. And because its default primary job is to keep you alive (not necessarily help you thrive, at least not without some training), it will dedicate resources to any inputs that come into your field of awareness. Combine this with the engineered attention-grabbing features of modern communication technology and you will see how hard it is to resist the allure of quickly checking that email or that text message. Every time a notification displays or pings, you are forced into making a decision. That is if you are following tip no.1. If this is so, you will struggle knowing that you had decided not to look until a set time. You might go back and forth in your mind for a few seconds and whether or not you yield is not really the point. The damage would have been done already.If, on the other hand, you are not applying tip #1, you will likely just switch to the notification (distraction) and lose all the mental momentum you had accumulated before that ping or pop came into your field of awareness.But whether or not you are applying tip #1, the damage would have been done as we will see shortly.

Phone it in or put the phone away

Here’s the issue - even if you succeed in NOT checking the notification, you would have still been distracted from your work and also spent some of your energy and self-control in resisting the temptation. Isn’t it better to just eliminate this drain altogether until you are ready? I say ye!“And why, pray tell,” I hear you ask, “should the phone be both silent and turned face down in a drawer?”Well, most cell phones alert (read distract) you by either a sound or a visual display or a combination of both depending on your settings. Putting the phone on silent eliminates the sound inputs and placing it in a drawer eliminates the effects of any digital pyrotechnics your cell phone manufacturer has included to keep you hooked.Adam Alter, the author of the eye-opening book – Irresistible: The rise of Addictive Technology - has this to say:

Phones are disruptive by their mere existence, even when they aren’t in active use. They’re distracting because they remind us of the world beyond the immediate conversation, and the only solution, is to remove them completely – Adam Alter

For me, the very act of turning the phone face down in a drawer sends a firm message to my unconscious mind that, for the next set time period, I am disconnected mentally and physically from the device. There is also a level of finality to the physical act of putting the phone away that just works. Try it for yourself and see.Now, let us turn our attention to Instant Messaging.

4. Turn your status to “do not disturb” on your instant messaging tool. Better still, log out of the system completely and only log in when you are ready to entertain IMs

The abbreviation IM stands for Instant Message. And a lot of companies now have internal IM services for their employees. If your company does not, or if you are an entrepreneur with no need for this at your current scale, then not to worry, tech has other ways of sabotaging your productivity. For you, there’s Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and a host of other “free” services that enable people to reach out to (read interrupt) you anytime they want. And that is the problem.

Always connected, always interrupted

It is very valuable, and frankly miraculous, that we can send and receive messages over thousands of miles and across several time zones in the time it takes to blink. But with this power also comes abuse of power. People can now interrupt at will, usually at their convenience, not yours. And, like email and text notifications, these “alerts” are difficult to ignore. What is worse is that it actually feels good to receive these IMs. We get a shot of feel-good-hormones because we feel like we matter. There is also the engineered dopamine release triggers designed into these IM applications. But we’ll leave that for another time.The main issue here is that the odds of you being distracted from your valuable work by a well-meaning work IM, a friendly chat or the latest trending meme is very high especially if you work for a large organization or have a large personal or professional network.

Adapt to your habitat

Turning your status to “do not disturb” will dissuade some but probably not all. Logging out is better. Log back in (or switch your status to available) at regular intervals and for set amounts of time. Be sure to check your company policy around IM status. If logging out is frowned upon, then see how you can minimize the impact of these IMs on your productivity perhaps by tweaking the notification settings.Remember, it is generally easier to adapt to your habitat than to adapt your habitat to you. The latter is ideal but you must pick your battles. If you have high autonomy, maximize it for greater focus and productivity. If you are more constrained, then do the best you can. Simply realizing that these IMs are sapping your productivity is an important start. With some creativity and using these tips as a starting point, you will find a rhythm that works for you.

5. Close all extraneous files, folders or windows on your computer that have nothing to do with the task at hand – and clean up your desktop(s)

Have you ever tried to find a needle in a haystack? Of course not. First of all, it’s a silly place to be looking for a needle. And second, who has a haystack sitting around their house these days?Ok seriously, I have always found that saying – looking for a needle in a haystack – rather amusing. But I cannot deny how vividly it describes the act of looking for something specific among many other things that are visually similar. It seems an absurd thing to task ourselves with. Yet many smart professionals do just this, every day.

Oliver Twist in a cubicle

A colleague of mine once asked me to help him with a technical issue on his PC. Let us call him Oliver. He was having trouble accessing a database I was managing. This was the first time I was in Oliver’s office and a few things struck me right away.First, you could barely see the surface of his desk. The space was clean, just untidy. Full disclosure, at the time, mine was not much better. I and, I believe, Oliver also, have improved a lot since then. But at present, his desktop was just a mess. After getting past the different documents and random paraphernalia on Oliver’s desktop, I was logged onto to his desktop.

From frying pan to desktop

Once Oliver had logged in, I experienced an odd combination of sensations as I beheld the exhaustively cluttered desktop screen before me. There were icons of all conceivable types. Not an inch of real estate was spared. I felt a mix of perplexity, wonder and dizziness. After a few seconds, I finally found the icon I needed. But not before Oliver had a chance to pre-emptively apologize for the “state of the desktop”. “Which one?” I thought playfully.But wait! There’s more.

Time to tab out

While troubleshooting the issue on Oliver’s computer, I had to use the internet. Oliver indicated he already had a window open and that I could use it. Had I known what I was getting into, I would have declined. Unwittingly, I steered the mouse, and clicked.With that one innocuous click of an innocently minimized window at the bottom of the screen, I unleashed a dizzyingly rapid spread of tabs like some digital magic card trick. Except with this, instead of 54 cards, it felt like there were 540 tabs. Actually, there were 36. Still though.There were duplicates and triplicates, different pages from the same site and similar pages from different sites,  most of which Oliver was not even using and had not used for days even. And the only way I know this is because I helped Oliver purge the tabs before I left.

How about you?

It is easy to look at Oliver and think he is so disorganized. But we all have a little Oliver in us – at least as far as these traits go. And some of us have a lot of Oliver, and then some.The problem with all these habits – crowding our desktop (both real and virtual) and opening too many tabs or windows is the same – it makes it hard to find what you actually need when you need it. Also, studies have shown that disorganized workplaces increase anxiety and stress and neat orderly workspaces correlate with calmness and composure. It is not hard to see why.

How many is too many?

It is tricky to tell you exactly how many tabs to leave open or how many icons to have on your desktop or how many individual items should be on your desk. But one rule of thumb is that less is more. I recommend cleaning everything out and starting blank. Then as you work, from this blank canvas, only move things to within arms reach if you find you use them over and over again.Also, schedule purge days – days when you go through your space (real and virtual) and clean house. Archive or relocate things you don’t use too often anymore and don’t be afraid to trash a few things too. Like the tabs on Oliver’s browser, many might have outlived their usefulness but continue to take up physical, visual and mental space. Move them out of sight and out of reach.The more windows you have open on your computer, the less likely you are using them all and more likely you will struggle to find the ones you do need to complete the task at hand.And now for the last tip in this article for getting more out of your workday.

6. Where appropriate, communicate this new work philosophy to your supervisors, colleagues and immediate reports.

This is where it all comes together. This point might not make a huge difference if you are a solo entrepreneur. But more and more, success in business and career depends on building networks and working in teams. Whether you are a CEO of a large multimillion dollar company or an administrator in a department of that company, you work with other people. You depend on them for your success and vice versa. Therefore, changes to how you want to do your work will affect them too. Therefore, where appropriate, let people know what is changing if it affects them.

Only if necessary

The nice thing about most of these tips is that you can adapt them and implement them without ever telling anyone. I don’t recommend drawing undue or undesirable attention to yourself. Some people are not enlightened to the damage distractions do to true productivity and may resent you. Alas, many still extol the virtues of responding to email within nanoseconds and being kept on a virtual leash for most of the day. We are not out to convert them, we are out to change ourselves – to be our best and to reap the benefits.

Break the leash

Try these tips for the next two weeks and see how it goes. Adapt if necessary but don’t give up. You now know what is at stake. It is time to break the virtual leash of tech.Until the next article, be your best and do your best.