In this quick guide, I’ll share my favourite tools and tricks for reclaiming your attention. The goal of this document is to give you practical ideas for how you can avoid getting distracted and retain your focus.

Pre-Commitment

Pre-commitment is a strategy of self-control where you reduce your ability to change a decision later. This can be very useful when trying to improve your consistency and avoid being distracted.

My favourite tools are tips are:

  1. Use freedom.to to block distracted apps and websites while you work. This tool blocks both your laptop and phone at the same time and is very cheap for how effective it is.
  2. Charge your phone in another room when you sleep and try to avoid having it near you when you work. By making it harder to get your phone, you reduce the chances you’ll get distracted when trying to sleep or work.
  3. Practise environment design where ever possible. This is the process of using pre-commitment around your home or office to make sticking to your goals much easier. You can get my free environment design cheat sheet here for lots of ideas on how to do this yourself.

Flow States

Flow states allow you to get far more done as they’re such a deep state of focus. To achieve this you need the following three components:

  1. Have a clear goal: You need to have a clear target to work towards: paint this canvas, build this website, cycle to this place etc.
  2. Make it matter: You have to care about the task. Our brains are wired to focus better on things we care about. If you don’t care about the task itself, you can sometimes cheat this by reminding yourself of what you’re trying to achieve and why this task will get you there.
  3. Be on the edge of your ability: The task needs to be hard, but not impossible. You want to be challenged so you stay engaged but not so out of your comfort zone that you can’t get going. If you find the task to hard, try to break it down into more manageable chunks to achieve a flow state.

Tips: