What to Do With Those Little Buggers Called Distractions

Work­ing online is great. No boss, you make your own sched­ule, you basi­cally run your own life. But work­ing online takes some self con­trol. The inter­net is rid­dled with dis­trac­tions. As well as dis­trac­tions from home.

It’s so easy to lose track of what you were doing with the friendly inter­net stand­ing by. There are a mil­lion and one dif­fer­ent ways that can ruin your focus with work­ing online.

- Check­ing your email

- Check­ing twit­ter messages

- That per­son on Skype that talks a lot

- That new youtube video that went viral

- Or your pet cat decides to stick his tail right under your nose.

- and on and on and on

I could go on all day about the dif­fer­ent ways to be dis­tracted. They can take focus off of what you need to be work­ing on. It’s not hard to get lost doing some­thing with one of these dis­trac­tions. Before you know it, and hour or two has gone by.

This can hurt your busi­ness. If your busy mess­ing around on the inter­net, you will lose time to work on things that per­tain to your busi­ness. And that is some­thing we can’t get back: Time.

So what’s a per­son to do? It’s pretty easy, and it just takes a bit of self control.

- While check­ing your email and respond­ing back to tweets are impor­tant for mar­ket­ing your busi­ness, it can also be very time con­sum­ing. Limit your­self to a cer­tain amount of time spent on these tasks. Set aside a cer­tain time of the day to check these and stick to it. Once your time is up, you need to stop.

- If you have to, turn off cer­tain things when you are work­ing on some­thing. Putting together your project? Turn off those alerts that you get when­ever your receive a new email or a new tweet. Out of sight, out of mind.

- Dis­trac­tions around the house can cause dis­trac­tions too. If you can, find a quiet place to work. A place where you won’t be both­ered by any­one for a cer­tain amount of time. And let them know, this is your work time, you need peace and quiet.

These are just a few ways to help rid your­self of the numer­ous dis­trac­tions we see every­day. The point is to get your­self away from them when you need to work on some­thing for your busi­ness. Find ways to either get rid of the dis­trac­tion or iso­late it to a spe­cific time. Then focus on what you need to do.

~Chris

What are some ways that you help get rid of dis­trac­tions while your work­ing?

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• Dis­trac­tions — 9 Prac­ti­cal Ways to Deal With Them
• 9 Ways to Free Up Time in Your Day
• 4 Ways to Re-Evaluate Your Busi­ness (part 2)

I’m glad to see you back at The OMV. I hope your enjoy­ing your time. Feel free to con­tact me for any­thing and if you haven’t already, don’t for­get to sub­scribe to The OMV Newslet­ter. Leave a com­ment too! I’d love to hear from you.