There is so much each and every one of us has to deal with, every day, to keep ourselves in check. To keep striving toward being healthy and accomplished. Sometimes it feels like, with all the things we’re supposed to do daily, there’s no room left in our mind for, you know, anything else.
How are we supposed to remember to sit up straight (but not too straight), not look at our phones too often, eat our food in smaller portions, and also be watchful about the levels of processing that food went through, and also do our work in bursts of 25 minutes [links] but stop working before we overextend ourselves, but also achieve more and more every day—and also live a life that’s relatively calm and productive and peaceful?
The length of that sentence alone is untenable—let alone actually doing all the things it described.
Trying to keep that all straight in your head, in active front-of-mind thought, would be a losing proposition.
Think about it: if every time you walked down the street, you had to think “Okay, lift leg, flex calf muscle, foot down, now swing other leg,” you know what would happen? You would trip.
So: at some point, you have to allow some automatic processing to take over. It’s how we develop as people to be able to handle more and more complex tasks and achieve more.
But there’s another obstacle waiting for us on other side of that deal. Something about the adaptive nature of our human bodies and minds can sometimes set us up to fall prey to a less spectacular set of habits. We might start to think that buzzy “efficient feeling” frantic checking and re-checking email is a productive use of our time. We might lose track of what’s actually important and impactful in our work, and as a result, attribute the same level of importance to everything.
Or, we might get stuck in front of a dopamine fountain—texts, TikTok, Instagram—and sit there for hours before we realize it’s destroyed our workday.
We do what’s easy—what comes naturally. Strangely, what comes naturally is not always what’s right for us. The easy things become routine, and then become stuck in place. A new “default behavior” is created. But, the painful truth is that those new “default behaviors,” left unchecked, could very well drive you into the ground. Burn you out. Make you unconscionably sad, often for reasons you can’t articulate. Make it really, really hard to be your best self.
So let’s avoid this fate. It’s no fault of your own if some or all of these have become entrenched in your daily habits. But it is your responsibility to tend to them. Here are some of those default behaviors and how to combat them.
Don’t let email dominate your life
Getting to inbox zero, where you have no emails in your inbox, is a beautiful thing [link]. Staying there, as you maybe could imagine, is another story. It’s always frustrating after working so hard to get every email out of your inbox when…lo and behold, someone has sent another email. Your inbox is non-zero again.
It’s worse still when the nature of your job actively depends on you having to stay on top of it.
It turns the experience of sitting at your desk into a constant fight or flight reaction of constantly monitoring, your cortisol spiking when you hear that little “ding” noise.
And, again—this is the default behavior for millions of office workers every single day. It’s not your fault if this is what your day often looks like. But this behavior isn’t conducive to meaningful work.
There’s a simple solution: batch your email time. Set specific times on your daily calendar to check in, dispatch courteous replies to all the unimportant nonsense people have sent you, pay a bill or two, and then tune out and work on something else.
Maybe don’t go as far as Tim Ferriss did [link] when he declared he would only check email once in the morning and once in the evening.
But do try it. Allocate specific times to check, respond, and send emails. This approach not only enhances focus but, if you can believe it, also boosts team productivity and creativity by freeing you up to not be freaking out all the time.
Establish a healthy “communication contract”
Email is one thing. But in our lovely modern world, there are increasingly more methods of communication that threaten to upend our peace of mind constantly. Texting with coworkers became commonplace at some point. Slack. Little tags on Google Docs saying “Can you work on this?” It’s everywhere. Ding ding ding.
All this opens the door to a somehow even more sinister phenomenon: the “always available” paradox.
You want to be a good co-worker. A good business partner, whatever. You want to be able to say “Don’t hesitate to reach out, day or night.”
You want to be the person who is so helpful in a time of crisis that they not only respond to the panicky midnight text, they handle the problem. And then, you’d imagine, go back to sleeping or whatever they were doing.
This is all well and good if you were, like, the President. Or conducting a space launch. Or even in the middle of a two-week company sprint ahead of a product launch. But it can’t be how you live your life all the time.
That would keep your cortisol high around the clock. And that, in some ways, means an early grave — among other things.
There’s research that suggests that being always “on” leads to work fatigue, procrastination, and poor work-life balance.
And the whole phenomenon becomes ever-more maddeningly dumb when messages are non-urgent or not at all important. The little notification bell can’t tell the difference between urgent and non-urgent. (And really, if it was truly urgent, wouldn’t they just call?)
So here’s the answer: establish a communication contract with your team. And set boundaries.
Set clear response time expectations with your team to break this cycle. Define the urgency of different communication channels and allocate specific times for checking and responding. Adjust notification settings on tools like Slack to minimize distractions and reinforce this new default behavior. Make fundamental changes by quitting chat and email apps at the end of the day, disabling notifications when with loved ones, and creating space to breathe and rest. While you’re at it, use tools like RescueTime to block distractions and maintain focus. (Sorry, sometimes we can’t help ourselves.)
Social media is still poison
Every now and then there’s a study that says “Actually, eggs are good for you,” or “kale is even better for you if you massage the leaves first.” (That one’s true!)
There is no new information coming out about social media. No studies say “If you consume only one hour a day, it’s actually good for you.”
It’s a firehose of attention span-dissolving acid. It’s probably making you either anxious or depressed or both. And you’re certainly not writing your novel this whole time.
It’s understandable—that desire to stay informed and entertained is strong, but it comes at a cost. Research shows that context switching, like checking social media while working, can devour up to 80% of your productive time. Maybe that’s okay with you. Maybe it’s not.
Make an honest audit of yourself and what you value. What do you most want to spend your time on? And, importantly: how does social media make you feel? Does it make you feel anxious? Sad? Inadequate? That’s important data. Listen to it. Shape your intentions around it.
Take a step back and consider what truly matters. Will missing a Twitter meme or Facebook post impact your life? Probably not. You have more important tasks and projects to focus on.
By keeping your core values front and center, you’ll be motivated to keep social media tabs closed and notifications silenced. Need an extra boost? Tools like RescueTime’s FocusTime can help you set limits and stay on track. Set a daily social media limit, and let the app do the rest.
Once you’ve reset your default behavior, use the necessary tools to support your new habits and stay focused on what truly matters.
Clear the decks and clear your mind
We’ve all been guilty of leaving countless tabs open, turning our browsers into a makeshift to-do list. Some even resort to using entire apps and systems just to keep track of…all those open tabs. Seems backward, right? That’s not all—this habit comes at a cost—decreased productivity and increased distraction.
Productivity expert Dan Silvestre suggests “clearing to neutral” throughout the day. Close unnecessary apps, browsers, and tabs to eliminate friction points and reduce procrastination. Make it a habit to clear your workspace, just like you would after dinner or when leaving the office.
Then, every day you can feel your slate cleaned, and the next day, start from a place of calm and openness.
As productivity enthusiasts, we often get caught up in using multiple apps, thinking it’ll boost our productivity. However, this can be a form of multitasking, decreasing productivity instead. We should instead look to streamline those tools
Productivity is about behavior, not tools. Identify the essential apps that support your task flow and eliminate the rest. Conduct a quick audit:
- Write down your tools and their importance
- Identify which ones truly help you work
- Delete unnecessary apps
Starting your day by “clearing the decks” can be a form of procrastination, distracting you from important tasks.
To reset this (or really any) default behavior, understand the stakes. Multitasking trains your mind to be distracted, leading to longer completion times, poor work quality, and reduced creativity. Give your work the respect it deserves – focus on single-tasking. Shut down everything except the task at hand and work on it exclusively. Your work is important, and it deserves your full attention.
Try it and watch what happens
With a lot of articles like these, the amount of information and advice dumped on us can risk feeling overwhelming. That’s the exact opposite of the goal of a piece like this.
Instead, for this one, you can choose your own adventure. Bite off the bits that feel like they most pertain to you, and try to tackle them one by one. Maybe it’s your phone, or your email, that’s most trying in your circumstance.
And if you’re looking for a place to start, try this: a simple five-minute challenge.
Procrastination stems from fear. So we’re gonna meet it head-on by doing something—anything. Try this, in order.
- Notice your urge to clear the decks
- Turn towards your important task with an open heart
- Break it down into small steps
- Focus on the first step for just 5 minutes
Alternatively, follow a piece of advice by a productivity thinker named Kevin Systrom: commit to 5 minutes of a task, and you’ll likely end up completing it.
Remember, life finds a way to distract us. To truly change your life, you need to reset your default behaviors and fundamentally change your thinking around email, texting, and social media. Only then will you see positive change.
Best of luck making the change—a little bit at a time.
