Since technology is so prevalent and integrated in our lives today, it’s also natural that we’re able to be easily distracted by it. It can be very useful for businesses, being able to transfer files and information instantly, but just as quickly, you can switch from working to watching videos for hours on end.
The worst part is, it can often be hard to tell how much time has passed once you start watching a bunch of videos on YouTube or start scrolling through Instagram. What seems like 10 minutes can quickly turn into almost an hour of distractions.
What you should do to avoid getting too easily distracted is using trackers to keep logs of what you’re doing with your screen time, giving you a greater idea of how much time you’re spending on work and how much time you’re spending on being distracted.
Many operating systems, such as Windows or iOS, already have these features built in to them, but you can also get third party programs if you so choose. These programs track how much time you spend on each program.
So if you watch 3 hours of YouTube and write in a Word document for an hour and a half, it’s going to tell you that. Based on the information you get out of it, you should be able to adjust your habits accordingly so that you know you’re actually being more productive with your time each day.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can set it up so that after a certain amount of time, the program will lock you out of that particular distraction. For example, if you were spending too much time on Instagram each day, you could set it to lock up the app from being used after 30 minutes of daily use.
After you’ve spent 30 minutes total scrolling through it, it would block you from opening the app until the next day, making you switch back over to working. There are extensions that you can use for your Internet browser that can even block out certain websites – either after a certain amount of time or during certain hours of the day.
For example, if you’re supposed to be working between 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., you could set it up to not allow you to log into Netflix during that time, so that you wouldn’t even have the chance to be distracted if you wanted to.
