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This is: Tools for keeping focused , published by benkuhn on the AI Alignment Forum.
Once I realized that my attention was even scarcer than my time, I became an anti-distraction fanatic. During my weekly reviews I methodically went through my past week, figured out what had been distracting me, and tried to eliminate it or replace it with something less distracting.
Over time, this has led me to find lots of tools (and ways of using my tools) that help me stay more focused. Here are some of the things I’ve started doing:
Anxious yet?
I aggressively disable notifications and badges so that I don’t mindlessly open distracting apps. If you’re into eliminating distractions you’ve probably already done this. But if you haven’t, it’s by far the most important thing you can do to improve your focus, so I’m putting it first anyway.
I have a zero-tolerance notification policy: if an app interrupts me, I ask myself whether the interruption was valuable, and if not, the app doesn’t get to notify me anymore. This has weeded out pretty much everything except for inboxes (phone, texts, reminders) and apps with a human on the other end (ride sharing, delivery).
A special dishonorable mention goes to Slack, which can easily suck away a quarter of your time without you noticing. If you use Slack and you haven’t disabled the “unread messages” badge, stop reading this post and do it now. (Consider setting a two-minute timer to remind you to quit in case you get distracted by checking your unreads, like I did while taking the screenshot above.)
On the subject of Slack, I try to keep it closed as much as possible and check it in batches a few times a day. Not all workplace Slack cultures allow this, but if yours does, I highly, highly recommend it. Doing this led to my biggest single quantifiable productivity improvement.✻✻ If your workplace culture doesn’t allow you to keep Slack closed, because it requires quick Slack responses, this is a bad sign.
I only check my email once per day.
Gmail filters send important email to a label called “Temp Inbox” and the rest to a label called “Unimportant.” I check Temp Inbox each evening and Unimportant once a week. Since incoming email doesn’t go to the inbox, I can open Gmail to compose or search messages without getting distracted by unread messages.
(I use a piece of Google Apps Script for this, but I think the Gmail UI has improved recently so that you can now do something similar with filters and it’ll have decent ergonomics.)
I have a second monitor that always shows a Complice window with the task I’m currently working on. (Complice is my favorite app for making lists of what I want to do today.) This helps me recover quickly from unintentionally going down rabbit holes.
I use Focus to break my habit of mindlessly checking sites.
For websites that are habit-forming but still feel useful on net, like Twitter or Hacker News, Focus lets me restrict my usage to certain times of day. It’s the only website blocker I’ve used that lets me fully automate blocking things in the exact way I want.
It’s especially important for me to use a website blocker that’s fully automatic, because the times when I need it most are exactly those times at which I have the least willpower to do any manual steps!
I also block most websites on my phone (using the iOS built-in content blocking in whitelist mode). Unfortunately, this works less well than Focus since I sometimes want to disable it and then forget to re-enable it.
I do most of my Internet reading on my Kindle via Kindle4RSS.
Using RSS means I’m in control of my own feed and don’t need to visit an adversarially distracting site like Facebook to get new reading material.
It’s also helpful that the Kindle delivery comes once per day at a predictable time, so I don’t have an urge to check over and over again for new c...
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