464: Minimizing Distractions
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What grabs your attention? At times, our focus is hijacked by external forces, such as notifications or phone calls, or internal, as we attempt to fill time or divert our thoughts from the task at hand. We discuss the impact of these distractions and share insights into how these constant pings disrupt focus and productivity. We offer strategies to manage and minimize such distractions and highlight the need for strategic time management to improve efficiency and reduce overwhelm.
Main topics:
Notification overwhelm
Disruption vs distraction
Costs of task switching
Understand how you work
Main takeaway: When a disruption occurs, we must prevent ourselves from immediately diverting to another task by placing it on a separate to-do list. This ensures we don't worry about forgetting it.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
emails, disruptions, notifications, phone, distractions, day, client, pings, work, pet sitters, writing, task, focus, pickups, people, intrusions, engrossed, life, app, confessional
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin Funkhouser
Meghan 00:00
Oh hi, I'm Meghan on Collin and we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional. Welcome. It's a podcast by pet sitters for pets ours. Thank you to our sponsor today, pet sitters Associates, and our lovely patreon supporters like Jennifer Teresa, Katie, Savannah, Adriana, Doug, Jack and Janie, thank you so much for taking a little bit of your hard earned money and helping the podcast keep going. And thank you for finding it valuable as well. If you're like us, you get a lot of notifications on your phone every day. It doesn't matter if you have an iPhone or an Android, these pings and pongs and oops, and beeps happen all the time. emails, text messages, Facebook notifications, Instagram alerts, LinkedIn, we are constantly being bombarded by people around us and the world. Really, if you have an iPhone, go to your settings and search for screen time, you'll see a lot of graphs, you can scroll down and you'll see the apps and websites that you use most on your phone. Right before you hit the notifications, there is a section called pickups. And this shows how many times you pick up your phone and unlock your phone each day. It will then show you which app you use after you've picked up your phone. And technology is great. This is super helpful because it allows us to get more insight into why we do what we do and how how we can help ourselves really,
Collin Funkhouser 01:21
yeah, I did this recently. And I found that I have an average of 227 pickups each day. But I was only getting 137 notifications. Interestingly, most of those notifications came from my email app. But for my pickups, the app that I would go to was my messages app. So you can either view this as somebody trying to stay on top of a business being engaged with conversations with people or view this as somebody who is obsessively checking my phone for no reasons that has trouble disconnecting and has way too many intrusions into his life. I'll let you guess which one of those it actually is. But it's about understanding what's driving this interaction. Is this an external intrusion? Or is this an internal disruption in our day,
Meghan 02:02
I was actually surprised to learn that my average pickups was less than yours, which is very confusing. And because I do everything on our phone, from our software to answering emails and text messages, I'm in communication with a lot of people throughout the day. But your pickups were more than me,
Collin Funkhouser 02:19
I think that just means you're never not on your phone.
Meghan 02:21
Exactly. I'm just constantly connected no matter what, you know, technology has always promised to make our lives better, we do more we are more connected, it brings the world to our fingertips. But unfortunately, it's really become a fire hose directed at your face. And it's hard to have the control to shut it off. The onslaught of the self imposed interruptions and intrusions into our lives is really beyond anything that we could have seen coming. There's a saying that goes around that if he would have talked to somebody in the 1800s or 1700s, about everything that we do and see and experience on a day to day basis with technology, it would have basically killed them. Because they would have absolutely no concept for the amount of distractions and disruptions and all the chaos that our lives seem to be in these days, there's an
Collin Funkhouser 03:12
extreme amount of overwhelm. And so that's what we want to talk about today is minimizing these distractions and disruptions that come at us without you know, at an ever increasing pace. And it is important to understand the difference between those a distraction versus disruption. disruptions are an external disturbance refers to things that come from an external source like other people, other events, notifications, for example, you may be deeply engrossed in your work and your phone rings, and maybe a client asking about potential services or changing their booking dates, not bad things entirely. But they break your focus and they divert your attention away from something that you wanted to do, and it really disrupts your workflow and hinders your productivity. A distraction on the other hand, is an internal disturbance. It stems from us and our own driving forces. It occurs when we willingly or maybe unintentionally direct our attention from what we're trying to do off to something else because of an internal stimuli or an external trigger that brings our attention there. Like if you're working, and then you see an alert on your phone that can be really tempting to to open up that app and see what's going on on Facebook and see that message. These also sidetrack our focus and impair our productivity and understanding these is important because they lead to a less focused day in a more overwhelmed life. I
Meghan 04:34
will say though, that distractions are generally easier to block out and control versus in interruptions and distractions are internal. You can really get frustrated by the constant bombardment of emails and pings and pongs and phone calls and door knocks. Whatever it is, because it takes you away from the work that you want to do or need to do. Which means that each task takes you longer to complete. It can be really frustrating what We're constantly having to task switch, there's been some research to suggest that in a given workday, disruptions can cost 40 to 60% of your time. So over the course of eight hours, that's three to five hours wasted. super frustrating. As a small business owner, our time is precious, though, we don't ever get any more of it, we don't ever get it back. And we're constantly behind on what needs to be done, we feel that pressure to always keep doing more and more. So while we need to talk about ways to remove items from our to do list, there does come a time when we need to make sure that we're actually being efficient with the time that we do have. And
Collin Funkhouser 05:36
that's the discussion we've had a lot of, are you actually doing the right tasks? Or what hats do you need to take off? Who do you need to delegate this to? Should this even be on your list? But beyond that discussion, let's say you've whittled all of that down and you've got all of the hats on that you should have, you've delegated what you need to? Are you actually being efficient with the time that you have remaining in your day? So that the tasks that are on your list? Are you actually getting to them? Or are they taking you 234 times as long to get through, because of all of the disruptions and distractions that are constantly taking apart your day, I
Meghan 06:11
feel like I can get this way when I'm needing to do something for a business. And I just put on a TV show in the background while I do my admin work. And then all of a sudden, 10 minutes later, I realize, Oh, I'm so engrossed in the TV show that I've not actually done any of the work I was supposed to do. So that is not efficient. And it's taking me way longer to get done what I need to where it could be, if you're sitting down to work through your emails and your phone pings. Turns out it's an email from your local coffee shop letting you know about their latest sale, that's great. But you don't need to know about that right now. So you swipe that away, and you return to the email that you were writing. When another pin comes up. It feels like sometimes I sit down and in the course of an hour, my phone doesn't stop pinging while I'm trying to do other things. And it's really distracting. It could also be that you just bought a new pair of shoes, but an email pops up with an advertisement from that shoe company asking for a review. The emails aren't the problem, though you may legitimately want to know about those, or you may want to write the review about the shoes because you love them. But if not, if you were not excited about those emails, or not excited about the pings you're getting or they're not useful to you unsubscribe from them something that we do about once a quarter we go through our emails, and every day, we just let them pile up for about a week. And then the ones that aren't relevant or we don't want anymore. We unsubscribe, you
Collin Funkhouser 07:28
said that the emails aren't the problem. We need to be notified by things as business owners, we need to have information coming into our life. The question is, do I need it right now? Or should it be coming in at all and really asking that find distinction, maybe you do need to unsubscribe from those emails, maybe you just need to turn off notifications for a brief time window. Or another idea is have your email set up to filter those kinds of emails into a folder that you can deal with later. So it takes them off of your plate in that moment, and places them in a folder so that later you're going to have on your calendar, review email time. And that's where you go to that folder that's been filtered out. And you can see what kind of marketing emails did I get today, because they're genuinely helpful. Sometimes, you just don't need to have those pinging up on your corner of your screen while you are trying to actually get worked
Meghan 08:19
on. Now I will say that we do send out a weekly email newsletter on Fridays about the podcast. Yes, if those are not helpful to you, we will not be offended, unsubscribe, it's okay. If those
Collin Funkhouser 08:29
are causing you more angst and more anxiety. Yeah, feel free and have that time back in your life.
Meghan 08:34
Prevent the emails and the distractions from popping up at inopportune times. The key then is to schedule that time to go back through those emails so you don't lose track of them. Another example is, if you're driving to a client's home and you're mentally preparing for what needs to happen, you're trying to work through each step in your head, and you remember what's required, then you hit four red lights in a row. Instead of trying to find that time to focus, you're now thinking about, I'm going to be late to the visit. I'm so angry, I hit another red light, how much am I going to be? How much time have I lost now at my other clients homes? Because you're checking the clock? Will you be late? What do you need to do for the rest of your schedule? Your mind wanders away from the task at hand and instead of mentally reviewing and preparing for your client, now we can't make the red light go away. It's a disruption to our day no matter what. So how do we recover from this? How do we handle this? Well, we stay focused, we take some deep breaths, we acknowledge the thoughts as they come up. You know, this is when I will arrive at the client's house. This is the how late I will be to future visits and know that you can't ever control the lights. They are going to happen they are what they are. And we just have to sit in reality of this is now what we need to do moving forward. Let
Collin Funkhouser 09:45
those thoughts pass as Megan said, you have to let those go because that is not something that you have control over and then tell yourself out loud if you have to self over the next insert number of minutes here. I am going to focus on my task to review, I'll get to worrying about that other stuff. But I need to finish this task at hand before I can move on to the next one. Because then once you've completed your review that mental that the mental process that you're going through as you go into that next visit, after you do that, you can address those concerns and do what you can. But the problem is, is that when we get so caught up with these concerns that come up throughout our day of now there's a disruption, I'm worried I'm going to be late. Now all of my thoughts times and attention is focused on being late. And now I'm going to squirrel away and worry about that, and what that's going to do instead of the work that I was doing at hand. And we just keep getting off the track just a little bit more. And we never end up getting the stuff that's actually meaningful to us.
Meghan 10:44
It's really about prioritizing your time, because I feel like when we sit down to do something together to finalize something, or to make a decision about something, I can get very distracted of my phone pings. Whatever it is, I look at it, I do assess whether it's important or not. But if sometimes I do go down the rabbit hole of that notification, and you're like, hey, whoa, let's let's bring it back up to the surface here, we need to focus and complete this task so that we can move on to something else,
Collin Funkhouser 11:10
it's blocking out that time and giving that time that time block a name of this next five minutes is talk about next week, schedule five minutes. That's what we have to do for this. It's not for anything else that helps keep you focus, it helps give it an assignment for that time that you can stick to have, you have to set that aside and then stick to it. And whether that's for emails, phone calls, website stuff, mentally preparing for your visit, block out that time, and then have a commensurate set of tools, apps, software, social settings to help accommodate that. A tool
Meghan 11:47
that you should always have in your toolbox is pet business insurance. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout for $10 off, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets@lse.com. But one way I
Collin Funkhouser 12:26
tried to personally avoid distractions, especially when I'm writing is to choose a basic writing app that can't do much there's not a whole lot of functionality to it, which is one reason why I hate writing in Google Docs. Because it's on the internet. It's in the internet browser. And I'm always so tempted to hit Command T to open up a new tab and go check out Facebook and see what's going on over there. So using something like Microsoft Word pages, something like drafts or notion, right, it allows me to stay focused because that app can only do one thing, right? There's nothing else that it can do. It helps me focus my time and attention and my energy in that moment and blocks out everything else. I then take what I've written and put that into a Google Doc, sure I can share and collaborate that especially with Megan so she can have access to a lot of those. A lot of disruptions again, come from our phones. So one tip and one thing you're going to have to stay on top of is that when you're in a visit with a client, have your phone silence, check out the settings on your phone to see that if you can allow certain calls from emergency contacts, or maybe clients that you're actively seeing, so that you can get the important calls. But it's silencing the emails and silencing the chats from your friends or family and everything else going on so that you can stay focused and in the moment with that client. If you're trying to buckle down on a really serious project, whether that's writing or working or you're trying to go through the scheduling or hiring or writing your SOPs. It may be it may behoove you to alert friends to alert family alert staff alert other people who are working with you that you need time set aside to focus and let them know say, Hey, I'm going to be on lockdown in my office from three to five today really focusing on the Contact me if it's an emergency, that pre emptive notification really helps you be at ease knowing okay, I've alerted people. That way. I know when I get alerted when I get that phone call. It's something that's really important.
Meghan 14:24
I feel like a lot of this comes down to setting office hours for the business and then sticking with those blocking out in an hour every day to work on business things. And then using that wisely. Putting your phone on Do Not Disturb because you know that you have to work on the schedule or your taxes or whatever it is.
Collin Funkhouser 14:41
And sometimes that those office hours may mean that you don't work from your home. If you're like me, it's very easy to get distracted while I'm at home because I start thinking about oh I need to go vacuum that or that needs cleaned or let me go check on the laundry or let me do some house chores and things like that. Or I get disrupted. uptake by phone calls are the knocking at the door from a delivery driver that takes me out of what I'm doing. So if you know that about yourself, go work at your local library, go find a coffee shop that removes you from those temptations of those distractions that you may have in another location that allow you to work and focus on those. And that brings it back kind of to what I was talking about with the writing apps of finding and sometimes having a unit Tasker is really beneficial. I love reading in just a paper book, because I can't open Instagram, in a paper book, I can't on my phone, it's very tempting to me, or reading on an e reader allows you to know when I'm using this, I'm reading for a purpose, and I can actually become more engrossed. And I can get a lot more from this, because I'm not worried about my e reader suddenly buzzing, letting me know that there's a new client wanting to book something.
Meghan 15:49
So I feel like you're saying I should not watch TV while I'm doing admin work.
Collin Funkhouser 15:54
No, that kind of stuff is fine, or listening to music, but no about yourself, if you put that on, and then go well, but I know in the next 15 minutes, I'm not going to be able to do work, maybe delay that or how listen to something else, watch something else. Background Music Background things are fine for people, it helps some people focus. We do that with the kids, when they're studying or working. We call it focused music, right? It's Lo Fi hip hop music that we play. Sometimes we're really trying to focus with them, because it kind of sets the mood and we know when this is playing, I can do this. It's about knowing and understanding yourself and what you need in that moment. And
Meghan 16:26
then also recognizing when we get angry or upset about it, I know I do that if I've done a project that was supposed to take me 10 minutes, and it took me an hour and a half, I get frustrated. Why did I waste so much time. But knowing that we acknowledge that it happened, we assess to see if something needs to be acted on immediately or differently, and then move back to your other tasks.
Collin Funkhouser 16:49
Because it is easy to beat ourselves up about this, we try and stay on top of these things. And we want to be productive, we know that our time is limited. And then we look up after 30 minutes and realize I've been looking at videos of cute talks running across the street for the last 20 minutes. Oh, I didn't do this stuff. Now I'm behind even more. And instead of getting stuck in that moment of being angry at ourselves, acknowledge that it happened and be realistic about that. And then change. When
Meghan 17:20
those disruptions happen, it's important that we don't say, Oh, this is not important, we'll never get to this, we're going to put it in a pile to be dealt with later, which is also going to help our mental burden and ease that a little bit of having, trying to remember it. It's writing it down on a note whether that's in your phone or on a physical piece of paper, that you know you're going to deal with this later. Because we often feel like we have to deal with the disruption right when it happens so that we don't lose track of it or forget to do it or the notification goes away. And what was that thing I was trying to remember. And instead, we need to move it onto a reminders list so that we can give it our full attention when we need to or want to be doing it. Whether we're dealing with a disruption that is external or a distraction that is internal, it is important to always remember that these things will come up these things will happen. It's all about how we handle them. Just as that when bad things happen in life. It's about how we handle it. When we take deep breaths. When we know about ourselves. When we know how we're going to react. We can make better choices and be more efficient with our time. We'd love to know how you handle these things in your own business or in your own life. You can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional. Thank you very much for taking your time your most valuable asset and listening to this today. We hope you found it valuable. Thank you also to pet sitters associates and we will talk with you next time. Bye
