For some time now, we’ve all heard that having a television or radio on while working is a distraction. That’s still true. But, there are other forms of distractions which we often aren’t completely aware of. In April, I wrote an article entitled Home Vs Business which went over how to separate your home computer workspace from your business, even if you have a one computer. However, I realized I left out some important advice.
Besides the common workspace distractions like noise and visual distractions, other distractions like having a clutter of paper on the desk in front can be distracting. That too is a rather obvious distraction. But I want to go over a few “virtual distractions” with you.
The first distraction is similar to the desk example. Having a cluttered Windows desktop can be distracting. When I cleaned up my desktop by putting unused desktop icons out of site, into the recycle bin, or correctly filed into other folders, I noticed a significant increase in productivity. When you have a number of desktop icons on your desktop, you can easily catch your eye on the wrong icons. Now, I’m not against having some icons on the desktop. A good suggestion for your desktop is to have these icons: My Computer, My Documents, Internet Explorer, and a folder which contains a current project in which you’re working on. When you’re finished with that project, move it someplace else like My documents. And never ever create a folder on your desktop named “desktop” or “stuff” or even “unused”. Just trust me on that one’s a big no-no.
Alright, let’s move on to some more potential distractions. The next one is internet browser favorites or bookmarks. You might think bookmarks are supposed to save you time when looking for a specific saved website. Well, here’s a problem I once faced. If you have a large amount of bookmarks all within one folder, a large amount of useful time is being wasted when trying to find a specific bookmark. Also, while you’re looking for a website, your eyes are scanning over several other favorite websites which you’ve saved over time. I sometimes found myself at another website which was on my favorites instead of the one I was originally looking for. I don’t know how much time I wasted from that single distraction, but it could have easily been at least five minutes.
So how can you fix that problem? It’s rather simple. Spend just a few minutes sorting your favorites into separate folders. I recommend having a “business” folder for websites which are related to any type of work that you do either on the internet, or with your job. Keep this folder at the top of your bookmark list so you won’t have to scan over other possibly distracting bookmarks.
Once you’ve fixed those two distractions, here’s another tip for you. Some people like to have these personalized search pages. I’m sure you’ve seen them. All the major search engines have one. My Yahoo is an example. Within the last few months, I’ve gotten rid of these things. Now I’m highly against them because they’re a distraction to me. I had a Personalized Google page. Unfortunately, I noticed that whenever I went to make a search at Google, I sometimes decided to check the weather (which isn’t too bad) but sometimes I ended up looking at news headline and totally forgot what I was going to search for in the first place. Don’t you just hate when you can’t remember what you were about to do?
Take a few minutes of your time and clean it up. There are usually (more often than not) more bookmarks that you can simply delete. What websites haven’t you been to in a long time? Do you REALLY need that site bookmarked? Good luck!