Disclaimer: This article is written for developers with a job that does not depend on emails, social media and texting. Most of the points are based on my personal experience.
We live in an age where social media, text messaging and emails have become an integral part of our lives. The average American spends more than 40 minutes a day checking their Facebook feeds. Whereas these tools are useful for communication and productivity, they may also be a distraction on your productivity. By applying little discipline, you can easily improve your productivity.
Image courtesy: Manish Tewatia, C# Corner
If you're active on one or more social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, Whats app and so on) and check them frequently, it could be a distraction to your focus and productivity. How often do you check your emails? Are emails an important part of your job function? Most of us have text messages enabled on our mobile devices.
The Lifehack's
article advice is to never check your email in the morning.
According to Morgenstern, checking your email the first thing when you get into the office each morning is problematic because it can a false sense of accomplishment. You answer 40 emails and you feel like you've done a lot of work, but in reality you probably still have piles of paperwork, meetings and phone calls to make. Answering email is essential to doing your work, but it isn't always something that is actively making money for you or your company.
Unless your job relies on social media, emails, or texting, you should disable automatic notifications. Allocate a block of time during the day depending your frequency and the importance of the emails. You could check your email once every hour or 2 hour block.
“Allocate a block of time to check your social media, emails and text messages.”
Once you allocate a block of time to check your social media, emails and text messages, make it a habit. Once it becomes a habit, you will never think about it.
Bonus Productivity Tips
The two most important productivity tips I can give you are, set a goal and make a daily to-do list. Before you leave your work for the day, you should make a to-do list for tomorrow and the first thing you do in the morning should be to review today's to-do list. Check out these two useful articles:
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- Seek help / Delegate tasks accordingly
- Do not get sucked into unnecessary meetings
- Create to-do lists
- Take breaks
- Weed out distractions
- Stop watching so much TV
- Set ambitious, yet realistic goals
- Designate times to handle e-mail
- Reward yourself for motivation
- Constantly ask yourself if you what are doing presently is productive
- Spend a few minutes preparing for the next day
- Sleep early and get up early
- Touching emails more than once
- Meeting just to meet
- Meeting without an agenda
- Repeating mistakes
- Using a phone as an alarm
- Allowing app notifications
- Being a chameleon
Summary
Unless your work involves frequent use of Social Media, Emails and Text messages, you can improve your productivity by simply allocating some time blocks for them.