How to Stop Getting Distracted by Your Phone

Jan 13, 2020

One of the keys to lasting impact is focus. It can be hard to focus with the dinging, the buzzing and constant notifications from your phone. The fastest way to increase focus is to remove distraction. If you are going to achieve your purpose, you have to get rid of interruptions and distractions. The good news is, you can change this and get results fast.

Here's how to do it:

1) Turn off all push notifications on your phone that are non-essential. For me, I only have my calendar that notifies me when I need to be somewhere. Nothing else interrupts me with an in-your-face alert.

2 ) When you need to do focused work without interruption, set your plan to airplane mode. That's right. No one can contact you. Don't freak out. There was a time when you didn't have a phone and the didn’t end. (If it did, where would you be?)

3) Let some people through - If the idea of being out of touch scares you, make exceptions for the people in your life that have interruption rights. You can serve all the stakeholders in your life without allowing anyone to interrupt you at any time. Something inside you, that habit of needing to feel that everything is OK, will kick against this. Resist it. You know that it is true that you don't need to hear from everyone all the time and give people unlimited access. Give your spouse, your kids, your direct reports, boss and key peers access to ring through. Block everyone else.

4)  Batch email and other inboxes to certain times of the week - Unless you are in sales as a faithful leader, try to check your email only once per day. Instant messages, social media text messages another messages do it in batches rather than throughout the day. Start with a couple of times per day then wean yourself back. Pretty soon you'll feel the rush of freedom in only checking one time per day.

Changing habits can be done.  The habit many have is that they expect their phone to interrupt.  It provides a quick dopamine hit that is easy to be a addicted to. This is a huge drain on focus and results and massive productivity losses. You will never get to lasting impact if you continue to be distracted and interrupted.

The more that you delay the immediate, the more you can invest in lasting impact. Make meaningful momentum.

Thomas Dodds helps faithful leaders generate higher profits, care for people, and make lasting impact.

Close

50% Complete

Two Step

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.