The blog

You know what it is like when you real­ly need to fin­ish some­thing imme­di­ate­ly. You want to focus entire­ly at the task, but just then a col­league pops his head through the door and asks you to ​“check some­thing”, or the phone rings and it just so hap­pens that some­one very talk­a­tive is on the line. 

Some oth­er time you are writ­ing a com­pli­cat­ed or del­i­cate text in Word and the soft­ware keeps sug­gest­ing oth­er word­ing than what you have used and if you are out of luck, you get repeat­ed sug­ges­tions from a perky pup­py try­ing to help you. 

You get dis­tract­ed and even frus­trat­ed and annoyed, which is the last thing you need in order to fin­ish the task. 

It is in sit­u­a­tions such as these you need to shut the world out, have some pri­va­cy, and make your­self unreach­able so that you will be able to con­cen­trate undisturbed.

If you do so, the urgent task gets com­plet­ed faster and the stress is reduced.

Do this

Here are eleven ways which will allow you to work undisturbed:

1. Put on tight-fit­ting head­phones and lis­ten to red noise when you are work­ing. Red noise is a syn­thet­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed noise which sounds decep­tive­ly sim­i­lar to a water­fall. At Nois​li​.com you can lis­ten to any kind of noise you would like. Choose ​“brown noise” and ​“waves”, and you will expe­ri­ence the feel­ing of briskly being trans­ferred to a beach with large, lap­ping waves (but with­out the seagulls).
2. Lis­ten to your favourite music (also in tight-fit­ting headphones).
3. Write in the word proces­sor OmmWriter instead of Word. In both pro­grams you write with­out dis­trac­tions. You have an emp­ty screen and on it you write text – no tool-bars, no but­tons, no menus, no red spell-cor­rec­tion mark­ings, no auto-cor­rec­tions which guess the wrong words, no remarks that your lan­guage is bureau­crat­ic and rigid, no faulty for­mat­ting – only you and the words. Pages (Mac) has sim­i­lar features.
4. Close and lock the door to your office. ​“But I can’t — I have to be avail­able for my co-work­ers!”, you might say. Yes, sure you can. You might as well have been ill and then you would not have been at the office anyway. 
5. Turn off all tele­phones, cel­lu­lar as well as landlines. 
6. Book the con­fer­ence room to have a meet­ing with your­self. Per­haps you have small, qui­et rooms which are avail­able for you to reserve at your office? 
7. Leave the office and sit at a cof­fee-shop or café to work instead. 
8. Close down the email app and deter­mine at what time you will open it again (and there­by go through your emails and emp­ty the inbox).
9. Take the oppor­tu­ni­ty when you are on the train. Do those tasks for which you need to be undis­turbed dur­ing a pleas­ant train ride. 
10. Take a break from social media. Close your Twit­ter-client, the online chat-app and Facebook. 
11. If you are a group, check your­selves into a con­fer­ence cen­tre for a day or two. Turn off your cell-phones, emp­ty the email inbox only at the end of the day and warn your col­leagues that you will be unavail­able. Pos­si­ble fires will have to be put out by some­one else. It is after all just a mat­ter of one or a cou­ple of days. 

This is what you will get for the trouble 

The effect of this will be that you can suc­cess­ful­ly focus when you real­ly need to. If you are like me, the sat­is­fac­tion of get­ting to work undis­turbed is immense (“I am in con­trol of my own plan­ning!”). A day marked by frus­tra­tion will now become a day filled with pleas­ant concentration.

How do you do it? 

What is your way of assur­ing that you are left alone? 

Tell me!