Tags: Career Distraction

Some things that I do to stay productive while working from home. Doesn't necessarily mean these are only work at home kind of things, but that's what I do :)

Perform a shut down ritual at the end of every work day

This is probably the highest value thing I do for productivity (when I can keep up with it). I wrote about it when I was working at Mediacurrent, and have recently updated it, so I might do an update on it.

Todoist is a big part of my workflow.

Drink Tea

Taking breaks to make tea is relaxing. Drinking tea is relaxing. Stepping away from my computer to take a break rather than just opening up a social media tab or checking email is relaxing. Taking a relaxing break means I'm more likely to return energized, rather than fragmented.

My brother in law recommended Adagio Tea and I am sooo hooked on their Earl Grey tea. Yum.

Use something to block distracting sites / apps for certain periods of time.

I used to use my pi-hole for this, but recently started using Freedom so I could block apps too (Slack and email are my biggest distractions now).

It's helped me to just work in 25minute distraction free blocks. I'm going to schedule one of these for the first 25 minutes of each day and see how that goes.

Another thing from Freedom - they have an extension called Pause that I started using today. It intercepts any sites you mark as distracting and make you wait 5 seconds before you can continue on. The amount of times I've opened twitter today and then decided against it has been refreshing actually. To be able to catch yourself in a habit and decide to break it -- that's a breath of fresh air.

Force myself to take breaks from the computer

I use Timeout for this. I use to use it, then got a new computer and never installed it, but have been enjoying having it back.

I have it set to take a 20second break every 20minutes just to rest my eyes, and then a 10minute break every 80 minutes to walk away from the computer. [//begin]: # "Autogenerated link references for markdown compatibility" [Career]: career "Career" [//end]: # "Autogenerated link references"