This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Instead of blaming yourself for getting distracted, pick one of the seven approaches to strengthen your focus.
Pause your email
Inbox Pause from Boomerang temporarily halts the flow of new messages. Automatic email breaks will help you focus on writing or problem solving. Email won’t stop unless you hit pause to concentrate. Works with Gmail and Outlook online or on the iPhone.
Pricing: Free for basic use. To customize email arrival times, or to hear from select senders during pauses, you’ll need a $15/month pro account.
Raise the cost of breaking your commitment
- Stickk lets you pick a goal and create your own commitment contract. You commit to paying money to a charity or person of your choice if you fail to follow through on your resolution.
- BeeMinder is a similar service that lets you make commitments tied to data you sync from various services, like steps tracked by your Fitbit, weight loss tracked by Withings, time spent on Facebook tracked by Toggl, or whatever else. Here’s a &feature=emb_title">video explainer.
Diagnose your email addiction
Email Meter analyzes your inbox and tells you how many emails a day you send and receive. Like a calorie meter or step tracker, it gives you a picture of a reality you may not yet have quantified. It can sum up how your email patterns changed during your remote work period, if you provide access to past email. It also assesses:
- how quickly you reply to emails
- who messages you most often
- how many emails you have that are waiting for a reply
- your busiest email sending and receiving times
Pricing: Free for basic use. $19/month to set alerts and goals and to access two years of data and custom reports.
Meet a virtual accountability partner
Focusmate pairs you with an accountability partner. You pick a time on the site’s calendar when you want to get work done. You’re paired with a real person far away who also wants to stay focused. At the appointed time you log in
When I tried this I liked the way the appointment hour made it feel like special work time. But it also felt a bit silly to be meeting with a random person over Zoom just to trick myself into feeling like I needed to concentrate.
Pricing: It’s free for up to three sessions a week, or $5/month for unlimited.
Join a productivity gym
Ultraworking ($49/month) and Caveday ($40/month) offer a kind of productivity gym service. You pay to be online in a Zoom room with a bunch of other people aiming to get stuff done. The idea is that being with others who are concentrating will help you by osmosis, and through a kind of collective peer pressure. Not my preferred way to get stuff done.
Replicate the sound of a cafe or colleagues
- Rainy Cafe lets you turn on the sound of a cafe and the sound of rain. You can adjust the volume of both so that you get only pure cafe sounds, or just rain sounds, or the sound of a cafe when you’re sitting by a window while it’s raining outside.
- Noisli lets you customize various background sounds with a bunch of options, ranging from birds or rain sounds to a coffee shop buzz.
- Sounds of Colleagues might help if you’re easily distracted by home noise while working out of the office. The ambient noise may put you into the workday mindset.
- All of these are free, along with other music tools for productivity I’ve written about. Rabbit-hole warning: pick a sound and go with it, or you may waste more time than you save.
Put a relaxing work setting on your second monitor
Life At lets you put a gorgeous setting on your laptop. Put a forest on your external monitor. Or a sleeping cat. Or a quiet beach. Choose the kind of setting you want, whether cozy or productivity-inducing.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here.
Zaloguj się, aby dodać komentarz
Inne posty w tej grupie
Social media platforms and content apps change all the time. But in the past few years, TikTok has changed more than many.
As the company has faced criticism from regulators around the w
With democracy on the line yet again in November, millions of progressive voters will do what they’ve been conditioned to do: They’ll open their digital wallets to try to save it.
A prac
For the better part of the past year, Nvidia has led the stock market. And if that proves true on Thursday, it could be an exciting day.
The chipmaker and critical AI component company,
Financial inequality remains an unsolved issue. The lack of affordable housing has led to a crisis where long-term wealth generation through homeownership is impossible for many. Closing the wealt
“A new AI era begins”
Signs displaying that confident declaration were plastered all over Microsoft’s campus when I visited on Monday. I wasn’t sure if it referred just to the W
Mastercard said Wednesday that it expects to be able to discover that your credit or debit card number has been compromised well before