Rule #2 – Disable notifications

The tools you use for work have been meticulously designed to distract you.

Well-intentioned product managers track how long we spend using these apps. The longer the better, in their opinion. They’re motivated to find more reasons to draw us back into our inboxes and chat apps.

This is why you get a notification for each new email, and why Teams and Slack display banners for every message in every channel you belong to. It’s also why Windows pings you about printers, updates, and the latest news headlines.

That’s just your desktop environment. Your phone has the same business apps, buzzing each time an email arrives or a calendar appointment draws near.

On top of this, we have personal apps – Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and so on. Together with business apps, these add up to an average of 46 push notifications a day. That’s one every 20 waking minutes.

No wonder people feel distracted. Ironically, a Microsoft survey recently noted that 68% of people don’t get enough uninterrupted focus time in their day. I wonder why, Satya.

You need silence

I’ve read countless statistics about the impact of distractions on focus. I’m not sure I believe them all, but I have intuitively learned I take at least 10 to 20 minutes to zone into a piece of work.

Perhaps I’m getting old, but it just takes that long for the RAM in my brain to reset, fill up with the pertinent details of the task, and for my grey matter to operate at full speed.

Achieving multiple hours of focus requires silence. I could never get deep into a document if Slack messages keep appearing in the corner of the screen.

Likewise, in Rule #1 – Check email twice a day we talked about setting aside time to process emails. This only works if you don’t have notifications tempting you to read every e-mail that arrives throughout the day.

Instead of having notifications pushed at you by insistent systems, you should choose when to receive that information.

In a future rule, we’ll cover the importance of blocking at least two solid hours a day to focus on important tasks. But for now, let’s discuss some high-level guidance for keeping distractions at a minimum.

Tame your phone

We’ll start by reducing how easily your phone can distract you. Your phone is likely to be a double whammy, containing copies of your business apps as well as your social media and personal apps.

At this point, I could rant about the benefits of reducing phone usage and discarding social media accounts. But for now, I’ll assume you don’t want to unplug from the world –- you just want it to be silent between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM.

Some people solve this by putting their phone in another room while they work. For me, this isn’t a solution, as I want to be contactable by my loved ones and colleagues with urgent and important news. But if that works for you, please skip the rest of this section.

Fortunately, taming your phone is easier than ever. Derived from some sense of guilt, phone vendors have been adding tools for managing screen time, and these can be helpful during the working day.

On an iPhone, it’s easy to set up focus modes that switch on automatically while you’re at work. You can select a handful of important apps to be available during that time, including phone calls and messages from people you care about. I’ve created quick links so you can find step-by-step guidance on Google or YouTube.

Android has a similar feature, although I’ve never tried it personally. (I’ve been an Apple fiend for a decade or more). Again, I’ve created quick links so you can find up-to-date information on Google or YouTube.

Tame your desktop

Your desktop likely has fewer distractions, but they’re more potent because they pop up in front of you as you work. The main culprits are e-mail and instant messaging.

For e-mail, go into the app settings and disable every notification that informs you a new e-mail has arrived. This typically involves disabling banners, task tray icons, and sounds. Here are quick links to instructions for Outlook and Gmail.

Test you have successfully disabled notifications by sending yourself an e-mail from your phone.

For your instant messages, it’s a similar story. Dig into the settings on each app, whether it’s Slack or Teams, and disable everything. Here are quick links for Slack and Teams.

While you’re rooting around in the chat settings, you may feel less guilty if you configure yourself to always appear away or offline. I do this so that people don’t feel offended if I haven’t responded during the brief periods I’m online. It also prevents people from pouncing on me when I take 5 minutes to check messages.

The only notifications I permit are meeting notifications. But even there, I have found the opportunity to optimise. By default, tools like Outlook create notifications 15 minutes before a meeting. I find that a bit keen – it interrupts my focus needlessly early.

If you dig into the settings on your calendar, you can typically set a default reminder to a shorter value. I’ve picked 5 minutes.

Google Calendar lets you set a default for all meetings, overriding the preferences of the meeting organiser. This is a wonderful feature, which Microsoft is yet to embrace in Outlook. However, you can edit meeting invites you’ve received (even recurring series) to set a preferred reminder.

Reap the benefits (after adjusting)

Once you’ve made these changes, close your distracting apps and focus on work. When you’re ready to deal with the inbound stuff, open your apps, process messages in a batch, and then close them down again.

But be prepared – it may take time to adapt to the silence.

Well-intentioned brain chemicals, such as dopamine, will entice you to check for new messages. That’s the reason social media is so enticing – we get such a kick out of seeing that notification symbol.

But stick with it, and after a few weeks, you’ll relish the silence. And you’ll discover you’re getting much more work done than you ever have before.