The struggle with digital distractions.
Everybody is suffering from digital distractions, both in personal and professional lives. It is quite easy to get distracted, it is impossible to avoid resisting the temptations. Technologies have evolved so much and at such an incredible speed that it has slipped into places where it shouldn’t have. Even though computers and digital devices have made our lives easier and efficient, it has made people suffer from being productive at work. Even our personal lives have been affected, we are not fully present when we are with the people we care about most. When we are out dining with friends, we are all occupied with our phones instead of talking to each other.
We are so hooked to digital products, we even take our phones to browse the internet while we take a dump. In the night we stay online longer than we intend to.
How did we end up here? What is the solution?
The solution is not to move away from the internet but to restrict technology to its place. I observed that my kid and wife were getting stressed out because of me using my phone a lot, using my phone while with them was sending a signal that the time spent on my phone was more important than the time with them. I wanted to avoid using the phone in the bedroom. So I started charging my phone in the living area. Now when I go to bed, it is not the last thing I touch, which gives me enough free time to talk to my loved ones until we fall asleep. This has also helped me to sleep on time. I am sure that I am not alone here.
The second biggest culprit of distraction is notifications. When focusing on a task, there is nothing worse than getting interrupted from Facebook saying your friend has posted after a long time, go and check it out. If you fall prey, instead of checking out the post and getting back to work, your next 20 mins are wasted scrolling through the posts in your feed. Most of the notifications we get are not that important, and it can wait. To avoid getting distracted from these notifications, I switched on DND on both on Phone and Mac. I also manually disabled notifications for the apps that I don’t need. I’ve only enabled Hangouts since that is how we communicate in our workplace. I get back online only when I am free or have some time to kill.
The third thing I did was to remove the frequently used apps from my home screen. When I unlock the phone, my fingers automatically used to tap on apps that I was hooked to. I wanted to restrict myself from opening these apps frequently, so I buried them down three levels deeper. Now, since it takes additional effort to reach them, the urge to open these apps has reduced drastically.
I get that these behaviors are entirely unintended, and the technology has made us so addicted, product companies have spent millions of dollars to keep us hooked.
Once hooked, it is hard to get out of that behaviour. But restricting access to these products by adding additional steps to access them, we can avoid the itch of using them frequently. I hope these tips help you to be more productive and spend more time with your loved ones.
