When you’re trying to work, getting distracted by a phone call, an alert, or your own thoughts about doing something else, can ruin your momentum. It can take many minutes to get back to where you were before that distraction, and let’s face it, too often you never do.

That’s why God created the phrase, “I’ll finish it tomorrow”.

And so, legions of productivity writers and speakers preach the value of eliminating distractions in your work day. Turn off your phone, close the other tabs on your browser, put on headphones and listen to white noise, they say, so you can focus and get your work done.

By and large, they’re right. I do some of these things myself.

But distractions aren’t entirely bad.

We watch sports or videos or play games or read fiction, in part, to distract ourselves from our problems, the news, and our own negative thoughts that sometimes plague us.

And that’s a good thing.

So, a few thoughts about the subject.

First, don’t feel guilty about taking breaks from your work or other responsibilities, to play a game or watch a video or three. If you enjoy doing it, do it. It’s good for your mental well-being.

Second, watch the time. Don’t play all day when there is work to be done. Yeah, that’s obvious, but we’ve all been guilty of telling ourselves, “one more video” or “one more game” and before we know it, it’s dinner time and we didn’t get much done.

Especially when working from home.

The solution is simple. When you take a break, set a timer and when the time is up, go back to breaking bricks.

Third, schedule regular breaks on your calendar. Time to play or goof off or close your eyes and do nothing. When we take scheduled breaks, we don’t feel guilty about playing for 20 minutes in the middle of the day.

When we don’t schedule breaks, however, when we allow distractions to just happen, that’s when we can get into trouble.

We want to do deep work but find ourselves in deep doo doo.

So, there you go. Break time is over. Thank you for spending it with me.

What’s next? You get back to work and I go watch a video. Or three.

I did something different today. I added a few time-oriented tags to my task management set up: #5min, #10min, #15min, and #30min.

That’s nothing new in task-management world, but it is for me. I’ve previously avoided using a time-estimate tag because I’m notoriously bad at estimating how long something will take.

I think organizing some notes will take ten minutes and an hour later, I’m still at it.

So, why am I re-thinking this?

Because I realized that if I allocate ten minutes for something and after ten minutes I’m not even close to finished, it doesn’t matter. At least I’ve worked on the thing for ten minutes.

So, instead of thinking about these tags as “estimates” I’m going to think about them as “allocations”. “How long I’ll work on this task” instead of “how long I think this task will take”.

In a way, this is a form of time-blocking, using very small blocks of time. Five minutes to check email, ten minutes for brainstorming ideas, 15 minutes for research.

Maybe after I do this for a while, I’ll get better at estimating. I hope so. Because when I’m sitting in a doctor’s office and I have five minutes, I’d like to be able to call up my list of 5-minute tasks and actually get one of them done.

Allocate some time to get more referrals

How many emails do you typically get in a day? And how much time do you spend processing them and responding?

My guess: too many emails and too much time. Time that could be spent doing more important things.

And then there’s the time we spend checking our inbox, to see what’s new. I just learned that the average is 88 times per day. Yikes.

We’re drawn to the inbox because we know it might contain something urgent or threatening, or, at the other end of the spectrum, something pleasurable or distracting.

We’re addicted to checking.

The problem is that each time we check our inbox, we lose time switching from the task we were doing before to the email and then back again. How much time? Up to twenty minutes. Yikes.

Now you know why an entire day can go by and you feel like you got nothing done.

No doubt you’ve heard about the habit of checking email just once or twice a day, at pre-determined times. That can help. When you check, make sure you have the time and energy to deal with what’s come in.

Consider doing an “email sprint”. Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes, get through as many emails as possible, and stop. That should leave you time to work on anything that’s urgent or important.

Oh yeah, you should probably do the same thing with social media. Just saying.

How about a referral sprint?