If you’re anything like me, you might notice that your mind has a tendency to wander easily. It happens to everyone, but it’s not often considered a problem. Is it?

What’s wrong with doing things casually? Arguably nothing. Are you working on a casual project? I think it’s fine to go at your own pace.

It becomes a problem when you want to push past some obstacle, or worse, you are obligated to push past some obstacle (i.e. employed to).

You’ll notice it most when you run into some problem that is non-trivial to solve. The moment you get stuck, your mind will try and think about ANYTHING else that you could distract yourself with.

Here are my three easy steps to dealing with that.

Set the scene

This is just preparing to get work done. Everyone can do it differently; maybe tidy your desk, get a glass of water, use the bathroom – basically make sure that you’re ready to sit down for a while.

Eliminate distractions

The non-obvious instructions, I take a lot of precautions to make sure that I’m not distracted by anything, especially visual. For example, when I have Discord running, the icon in the task tray has a red dot when there are messages to be read – you can turn that off. Turn off ALL visual cues. Social notifications are a plague to productivity.

Set your phone to DND mode. I don’t mind pings and beeps because they’re easy to ignore, but if someone is calling and I’m leaving them ringing or have to manually send them to voicemail, that’s just kind of rude.

Set a timer

Everything in order? Get a timer and set it to 30-60 minutes depending on how motivated you are (or how long you can ignore people needing your attention), and then get to work. The timer duration is also a visual cue, and you don’t want that to be visible either. During this period, don’t do anything else but focus on one task you are trying to accomplish. Any social notifications can wait until later.

When the timer expires, you can take a short break and indulge in any distractions you want; just don’t get too carried away. Start another session before long while your brain is warmed up.

This is loosely based on the Pomodoro Technique, and there is probably some merit in subtle brain-training if you keep your intervals to some standard.

Pomodoro masters have more nuance to their discipline, such as keeping records of intervals per task or deliberate retrospection of work being done, but that’s out of the scope of this short article; it’s something I’d like to improve personally, too: I’m not great at estimates, and the first step to bettering that is to record more data of time spent on tasks.