Once I realized that my attention was even scarcer than my time, I became an anti-distraction fanatic. During my weekly reviews I methodically went through my past week, figured out what had been distracting me, and tried to eliminate it or replace it with something less distracting.

Over time, this has led me to find lots of tools (and ways of using my tools) that help me stay more focused. Here are some of the things I’ve started doing:

I aggressively disable notifications and badges so that I don’t mindlessly open distracting apps. If you’re into eliminating distractions you’ve probably already done this. But if you haven’t, it’s by far the most important thing you can do to improve your focus, so I’m putting it first anyway.
I have a zero-tolerance notification policy: if an app interrupts me, I ask myself whether the interruption was valuable, and if not, the app doesn’t get to notify me anymore. This has weeded out pretty much everything except for inboxes (phone, texts, reminders) and apps with a human on the other end (ride sharing, delivery).
A special dishonorable mention goes to Slack, which can easily suck away a quarter of your time without you noticing. If you use Slack and you haven’t disabled the “unread messages” badge, stop reading this post and do it now. (Consider setting a two-minute timer to remind you to quit in case you get distracted by checking your unreads, like I did while taking the screenshot above.)
On the subject of Slack, I try to keep it closed as much as possible and check it in batches a few times a day. Not all workplace Slack cultures allow this, but if yours does, I highly, highly recommend it. Doing this led to my biggest single quantifiable productivity improvement.^{✻^✻
If your workplace culture doesn’t allow you to keep Slack closed, because it requires quick Slack responses, this is a bad sign.}
I only check my email once per day.
Gmail filters send important email to a label called “Temp Inbox” and the rest to a label called “Unimportant.” I check Temp Inbox each evening and Unimportant once a week. Since incoming email doesn’t go to the inbox, I can open Gmail to compose or search messages without getting distracted by unread messages.
(I use a piece of Google Apps Script for this, but I think the Gmail UI has improved recently so that you can now do something similar with filters and it’ll have decen

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