Second Cup: What you don't know can't distract you

Limit incoming information so you can get more done

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is that what you don't know can't distract you.
By reducing the number of audio and visual notifications you get,

(00:25):
you can increase the chances that you focus on whatever
you choose to focus on. I don't have to tell
anyone listening to this podcast that the world can be
a distracting place. Our phones and laptops can wind up
dinging all day long, to say nothing of people popping by. Now.

(00:46):
To be clear, sometimes things that look like distractions are
just the nature of collaboration or building your relationships. If
you work at home, I would suggest not scheduling anything
un in interruptible for the moment your kids get off
the bus. They might want to tell you about their days,

(01:06):
and planning for that is probably better than viewing that
as a distraction. And if you work at home, you
actually do want your colleagues to reach out to you
if doing so means that you are not a bottleneck,
or if you're able to redirect something that would take
a long time to unwind. That said, none of this

(01:27):
is either or, and many of the things that distract
us do not rise to that level of necessity. The
key is minimizing the unimportant distractions so that you have
more bandwidth for getting your work done and properly responding
to important interactions. So think about what generally happens when

(01:50):
you get distracted. I know that for many people, being
able to see that there are unread messages piling up
in your inbox can make you feel antsy. If this
is happening on your laptop or desktop, one easy way
to avoid this feeling is to expand whatever you are
working on to fill the entire screen. Now you can't

(02:13):
see the rising number, or the bolded messages, or anything
else you are still logged in in case this is
an issue for you, but what you don't know can't
distract you. I would also suggest being judicious about your phone.
Make sure you have turned off alerts from apps you

(02:33):
really don't need to know a baseball score or most
headlines in the middle of a workday when you are
trying to focus. The trickier area is texts and calls.
These days, if someone is calling you, it might be
a colleague who really does need your quick input on something. Indeed,
many of us tell our colleagues call if it's urgent.

(02:56):
So one approach is to set your phone to send
just unknown numbers straight to voicemail, so you don't hear
a ring for SPAN calls. That way, you are only
hearing a ring when it is people you probably do
wish to hear from. Then look at your text chains.
Any highly active ones that tend not to be urgent

(03:17):
can be put into quiet mode. They'll still be there,
and when you choose to pick up your phone, you
can see that you have forty texts, and you will
know that the neighborhood association is still figuring out how
to get people to bring their trash cans in quickly
after the trash pickup, but you won't hear the dinging
forty times. I'd say this can even be true with

(03:39):
colleague group texts. Go ahead and make any of them
quiet that you don't think are going to be urgent.
You might be wrong, but most of us pick up
our phones every thirty minutes or so. Anyway, The goal
is to get to the end of those thirty minutes
without having distracted yourself for anything that is not worth

(04:01):
distracting yourself for now. I know that many of us
wind up distracting ourselves in various ways, and we need
to work on that too, But limiting the inputs can
help a lot. We can't get rid of all of them,
but we can definitely get rid of some of them.
What you don't know can't distract you, and in the

(04:23):
war for attention, every little victory matters. In the meantime.
This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Hey, everybody, I'd love to

(04:45):
hear from you. You can send me your tips, your questions,
or anything else. Just connect with me on Twitter, Facebook
and Instagram at Before Breakfast pod that's b the number
four then breakfast po. You can also shoot me an
email at Before Breakfast Podcasts at iHeartMedia dot com. That

(05:06):
before Breakfast is spelled out with all the letters. Thanks
so much. Should I look forward to staying in touch.
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