Yesterday we had a bit of a clear out at home and I dedicated the bottom drawer in my bedside table as a charging station. It is where all of my most used electronic devices now live (the ones which are used less often are in a plastic tub under the bed). Once I’d finished setting it up I started to think about what I was going to get out and when. Some of it is obvious: I will get my headphones out when I want to listen to music, but others not so much.
It occurred to me that the default was that I would have certain things with me all the time, or at least within easy reach. My phone being the main culprit there. But with a new default (the bottom drawer) I started to think about what that was going to mean when I was working. Which led me to realise how many potential disruptions I was surrounding myself with.
Old Count of disruptions at work
- Personal Phone: Messages
- Personal Phone: Phone calls
- Personal Phone: Whatsapp
- Apple Watch: Messages
- Apple Watch: Phone calls
- Apple Watch: Stand reminders
- Work Phone: Messages
- Work Phone: Phone calls
- Work Computer: Email
- Work Computer: Google Hangouts messages
- Work Computer: Google Hangouts calls
- Work Computer: Jabber
Which doesn’t even cover the things that might not send me messages to disrupt me but that I might just pick up and check on my phone. It’s a crazy amount of things that could be breaking my concentration.
A brief aside – I have been struggling to decide what to do with my Apple Watch for some time. It doesn’t really fit in with my lifestyle to have a small square strapped to my wrist. But at the same time it’s very useful for tracking my workouts and as a silent alarm so I don’t wake up the whole house in the morning. It seemed like a waste to only use it for those things while it was always out, but now it’s in a drawer I don’t feel the same responsibility to use it all the time.
There are some distractions that I can’t do anything about. My boss wants me to be available on instant messenger so I have to have that running, but I considered my options and came up with this:
New Count of disruptions at work
- Work Phone: Messages
- Work Phone: Phone calls
- Work Computer: Email – but I keep it paused using Boomerang so it’s not constantly disrupting me
- Work Computer: Google Hangouts messages
- Work Computer: Google Hangouts calls
- Work Computer: Jabber
This means that I am using my computer to listen to music, but that’s not a big problem and certainly worth doing to halve the number of disruptions I have to deal with in a day.