5 tips for (more) focus time
Work from home apparently moved usual office conversations to instant messengers. Those instant messages often lead to an overload of notifications. No chance to stay focused, right?
Work from home obviously involves not being in an office and hence not being around people. Your touch points are either (video) calls or instant messengers like Slack. Receiving a lot of instant messages (in addition to emails and calls) can be very disturbing and doesn’t leave much time for focus.
Facing this issue I’m constantly optimizing my strategy to maximize my focus time. Within this post I summarize the most important parts.
#1 Focus on the important things
First of all you should have a project management tool or to-do list ready that fits your needs. This way you can make sure that nothing you need to do get’s lost. In my case this is an Asana board.
I cluster my tasks in several states:
- To do / Backlog = Things I need to do (but not right now)
- Today = Things I need to do today
- In progress = Things I’m working on right now
- Complete = Things I’ve already achieved
- Waiting for feedback = Things that I’ve done but need feedback from co-workers, clients,…
Within each column I sort my tasks by priority descending and constantly re-prioritize whenever new tasks pops up.
#2 Convert emails and messages to tasks
If you’ve got your to-do list or board in place you are ready to not answering every single notification immediately. Say what? Ignoring messages? No. You don’t need to ignore messages. Just answer urgent messages immediately and move less urgent messages to your to-do list. Most tools (like Asana, Trello, Jira, …) will allow you to simply forward emails to your to-do list or create tasks right away from your instant messenger (e.g. Asana for Slack).
#3 “To” emails first. “Cc” emails later.
Although instant messengers play a major role in our work life, email is still more than present. Whereas instant messengers are grouped into channels and private messages that help us grouping and prioritizing, emails just arrive in our inboxes unlabeled.
What helped me dealing with big loads of emails is to simply filter them by emails that are sent to me and emails that I just received in “cc”. To do that you can simply set up a filter/rule in your Outlook, Gmail,… that moves “cc” emails to a separate folder right away. This way you can read emails that require action first, an emails that are just for your information later.
(Credits for that hint go out to Alexandra Ried.)
#4 “Do not disturb”
As I already wrote in my last post, I recommend using the “do not disturb” mode in your instant messenger or — even better — your operating system. macOS and Windows offer this functionality by default. Stay focused and just check for new messages or emails when you step out your focus zone.
This will furthermore protect you from — possibly embarrassing — messages popping up while sharing your screen in a video call ;-)
#5 Be transparent about your status
And last but not least, one of the most important rules for remote work: Be transparent.
Show your co-workers that you are currently in focus mode by e.g. setting your Slack status accordingly. This way they won’t expect immediate answers and you can stay fully focused in good conscience.
