Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge | Photography by Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images
Iâve been working from home for close to 15 years. I also have ADHD. And a lot of streaming subscriptions. And a PlayStation. And hundreds of books. And a partner who also sometimes works from home and is equally aware of the presence of said streaming subscriptions, PlayStation, and books.
The point is that my home is full of distractions. Yours probably is, too. Maybe different distractions from mine, but distractions nonetheless. And, like many workers, it may have taken you a pandemic to discover that it can be hard to avoid these distractions when working from home. (Work itself provides plenty of distractions already, if youâre not carefulâ the continuous pings of emails and Slacks can make you feel like youâre working all the time but never actually getting anything done.)
Sure, there are productivity and project management apps. But Todoist isnât going to help you resist the siren call of TikTok, and Trello isnât going to play catch with the dog. At a certain point, you can only manage your distractions by managing yourself.
Accept your distractibility
The first step to mitigating distractions when working from home is to accept that you become distracted because humans are distractible. It is part of your nature. And thatâs okay.
Take, for instance, someone who keeps oversleeping because they hit the snooze button on their alarm nine times before finally getting up. Seasoned oversleepers know that one way to overcome this is to keep the alarm clock several feet from the bed â requiring the would-be oversleeper to get out of bed and walk across the room to hit the snooze button each time the alarm goes off. At a certain point, it becomes more restful to just stay awake.
You can do the same thing with distractions â by setting yourself up to be distracted from your distractions when you inevitably succumb to them (if not beforehand).
Letâs say that your weakness is television, and you know if you decide to âtake a quick breakâ in front of the TV, itâs an even-money shot that youâll still be on the couch three hours later.
If you canât resist the siren call of your Vizio, then set yourself up for, if not success, minimal failure. Donât risk getting sucked into a binge-worthy hour-long drama with eight episodes to go â and if you do, donât wait to pull out until the end of an episode, when youâll probably be at your most desperate to see what happens next. Instead, put on something simple that gets in and out of a story fast. A kidsâ cartoon thatâs separated into six-minute installments. A documentary series that takes only five minutes to explain how baseball gloves are made before moving on to medical electrodes. A daytime talk show that settles questions of a childâs paternity or a loverâs fidelity between commercials for mesothelioma lawyers. Something that will quickly leave you ready to move on to something new.
Or letâs say your weakness is a particular phone app. You might benefit from some kind of barrier to getting sucked into it. My editor Nathan tells me that heâs had success logging out of, or outright deleting, addictive apps if heâs on deadline. Personally, I like to leave my phone in the next room sometimes. (After all, the phone is there for my convenience, not other peopleâs.
Set daily limits
But letâs say you donât want to go quite that far, either because you have the kind of job that requires you to frequently have or be using your phone or because youâve got a bad case of nomophobia. You can set daily time limits for individual apps in Android and iOS.
In Android
Tap the chart to set your timers
Choose your app and set your timer.
Go to Settings > Digital Wellbeing & parental controls
Tap the chart
Tap Set timer next to the app you want to limit
Select the time limit you want to set, then tap Set
In iOS
Screen Time lets you set limits.
Choose which apps you want to limit.
Go to Settings > Screen Time
Make sure Screen Time is turned on
Go to App Limits
Tap Add Limit
Select app categories or individual apps that you want to limit
Tap Next
Select the time limit you want to set (Optional: You can tap Customize Days to set time limits for specific days)
Tap Add
(Oh, and donât forget to disable push notifications.)
If you live with someone sufficiently kind and understanding (and especially if they work from home, too), try the buddy system. Know each otherâs bad habits. Then, if one of you catches the other âstuckâ in some distraction, gently call it to the otherâs attention in a bid to snap them out of it. A simple âHey. Youâre stuck. Get unstuckâ can work wonders if youâre both committed to doing better.
To be clear, the goal isnât to avoid non-work at all costs. The goal is to manage distractions. Sometimes, that means leaning in.
Schedule everything
While recovering from a car accident years ago, my occupational therapist told me not only to take frequent breaks as I worked from home but also to schedule those breaks on my calendar â and to stick to them as religiously as if they were a work call or a deadline. Ditto for household chores, walks outside, and just about anything else that wasnât âwork.â Even eating had to go in the calendar.
I smiled and nodded and ignored this advice. I continued to struggle.
Finally, I gave in â scheduling things like laundry, snacks, and exercise such that I was never working for more than 55 uninterrupted minutes (and usually less). A typical day in my calendar would have 30- to 55-minute work blocks punctuated by chore breaks, food breaks, exercise breaks, rest breaks, and errands. Every minute during my scheduled workday was accounted for.
And sure enough, my physical condition gradually improved. (Iâm better now, by the way.) But there was a curious side effect: I was way more productive. Scheduling my distractions and my other non-work into my day, compelling myself to engage in them as forcefully as I would any âworkâ task, made me more efficient at and more focused on my work. And sticking to a strict schedule for mundanities like âwatch TVâ and âdo laundryâ helped me manage my ADHD symptoms â without it ever feeling grueling.
(I also got more laundry done.)
It turns out this resembles the Pomodoro Technique â a time-management method developed in the 1980s, whereby you work in 25-minute intervals punctuated by short breaks. And my routine even more closely resembles the 52/17 rule â a Pomodoro variation proposed by the Draugiem Group, makers of the productivity app DeskTime. In 2014, the company reported finding that DeskTimeâs most productive users would work for 52 minutes at a time, then break for 17 minutes, and so on. Their breaks became more âeffectiveâ because they would be 100 percent dedicated to taking a break during those 17-minute allotments â and, by extension, more dedicated during their 52 minutes of work.
The takeaway here is that breaks need to happen, so put them on your calendar. To the extent practicable, schedule everything during your work-from-home workday. Everything. From that phone call you need to make to your doctorâs office to the time youâd like to spend playing Fortnite. (And, of course, your actual work.)
Ditto for meeting the needs of your cohabitants. Roommates, partners, family, pets â anyone you live with is going to want something from you from time to time. Youâll need to get really good at saying no if you want to minimize distractions (learning to say no goes beyond the scope of this article), but there are things youâre going to have to say yes to. At some point, the kids will need to be picked up, the trash will need to go out, dinner will have to be made / ordered, etc. Schedule as much as you can in advance. And if you both work from home, tag-team responsibilities (e.g., âIâll take toddler duty during the even hours, you take toddler duty during the odd hours.â)
Also, donât forget negative scheduling. Sometimes, distractions are even more unwelcome than usual (such as when youâre on a video call, working on a complicated problem, or rushing to get a project finished). Just as you would do (or, at least, should do) with your remote coworkers, be communicative. Let those you live with know in advance that 1:30-2:30PM tomorrow is off-limits. Or that if your door is all the way closed, donât come a-knockinâ.
The corollary of all of this is that, to avoid distractions while working from home, you also have to avoid work distractions while living from home. Unless you truly have the kind of job where you have to be available 24/7, make sure that when youâre off the clock, youâre off the clock â whether for dinnertime, bedtime, family time, or alone time. You canât make the most of your work if youâre making the least of your life.