![]() ![]() Here are some tips and tricks you can use to minimize their effect. Social media, YouTube, news outlets, online shopping, emails, and Slack notifications - all these can become a source of distraction if your brain is craving it. Eliminate distractionsĪs I mentioned in the introduction, the problem with being a developer or another skilled professional working in front of a computer is that, no matter what we do to eliminate distractions in our environment, there’s still a lot to be distracted with right in front of your eyes. So, if possible, this place should be separated from where you have fun in your house - restricting your deep work to a particular space reinforces that notion. If you have a shiny Playstation right where you work and a new game just came out, it’s going to become difficult to resist it when you need to focus. This means no phone with notifications ringing, no TV, or other gadgets that may steal your attention from the task at hand. Ideally, when working from home, you should have a space set explicitly for working - with good lighting and a comfortable chair to reduce friction and distractions to a minimum. Our brains need constant stimulation, so we instinctively and irrationally hold onto whatever keeps us engaged whenever we get bored. If I, for example, keep my phone where my hand can reach it, I know that I’ll eventually pick it up whenever something comes along that puts me in a state of boredom - like a build on the project I’m working on that’s taking a bit too long. This isn’t a one-time thing - your ritual needs to keep adapting as you unfold what works best for you - my ability to focus is something I’ve been honing for years.Īn environment that isn’t tailored for focus will inhibit your chances to perform at your best. ![]() I've heard of some similarities between my ritual and other people's - a colleague here at Pixelmatters listens to a specific album whenever she needs to focus. The examples above are what works for me. To focus, you need, first of all, to define a ritual for yourself and adapt your environment to be suitable for a focus state. took off my Apple Watch and turned on “Do Not Disturb mode” on my phone Īs you can see, focus doesn’t come easy to me, especially when I’m most stressed and my brain just wants a quick fix of dopamine, be it social media or answering my friends’ texts.turned off all notifications on my Mac.put on some noise-canceling headphones.Just now, when sitting down to write this article, I: To focus properly and develop your best work, you have to have some tricks up your sleeve. These same tasks and tools are the ones that are "distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused." Recognize any tasks that match this description? I immediately think about all the pings and notifications that plague our day - from Slack channels to emails begging to be answered. However, with the introduction of faster communication tools and an ever-evolving information economy, deep work has become both scarce and valuable, being replaced by what the author calls shallow work: "Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted." These activities are the ones knowledge workers nowadays need to perform every day, especially in the technology world - from designers and project managers to developers of all kinds. The need for focusįirst of all, it's important to define the importance of focus in the technology line of work.Ĭal Newport calls deep work the type of focused work I'm referring to, in his book with the same name: "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit." So, how do you find focus while working from home? It turns out it's not that different from the techniques used to find focus in an office environment. As a junior developer learning to find focus on my daily job, that sentence really resonated with me I've been researching techniques and refining my method for focusing since then.įast-forward a few years, and Covid-19 happened - forcing us to work from home, where distractions abound, the fridge is always near you, and you don't have colleagues' eyes lurking around you, making you feel guilty if you end up surfing the web. A poster on the wall of an office that I worked in said, "Being a Good Developer is 3% talent and 97% not being distracted by the internet".
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