I Am Not Here to Distract You: My New Social Media Promise

You know how sometimes random things come together in a way that makes you think of something in a different light? That’s partly a definition of creativity—seemingly disparate things/ideas being brought together to create something new. Well, yesterday I had a few things coincide that got me thinking about how I want to handle my online presence.

As many of you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and distraction lately (and really for a number of years now.) Hence my 30-Day Social Media Declutter (which I wrote about here) and what I learned from it (which I wrote about here.) So this is a topic that is constantly buzzing at a low hum in my mind.

Yesterday, a few things happened that got my gears grinding about this topic again. First, I attended an online workshop about how to do social media well as an author. I enjoyed the workshop and appreciated the information. Much of it was about picking which platforms best suit you and how to be fun and on brand as an author. This can include things like posting funny memes, cute pet photos, and entertaining videos. Things many of us enjoy. Things that many authors do well.

However, when I imagined myself looking for fun cat videos to post or finding cute memes, I kind of winced inwardly because—wow, I see that distraction train roaring down the tracks straight for me. I don’t think I can trust myself to go searching for those things because a) I’ll get lost in the internet black hole (I mean, what’s more tempting than endless cute animal videos?) and b) my perfectionism will make me search endlessly for the “perfect” one to post. Plus, I don’t post photos that aren’t mine or aren’t paid for after getting sued years ago over using a photo on my blog. So, I listened to the advice but also knew that I couldn’t heed some of it. But let’s put a pin in that thought for a moment. Because…

Later that night, I was reading the essay collection On Being 40(ish). This was such a great read, and I really got a lot out of many of the essays. I know I’ll be revisiting a few of them. But one near the end called “I Don’t Have Time for This” by Sophronia Scott really resonated with me. In it, she talks about how her friend called her to be miserable about the election results together. Here’s an excerpt:

“My friend has called me to commiserate. But I’m not miserable. I haven’t given a thought to being miserable. The sun is pouring through the windows of my yellow kitchen, my family is healthy, my friend is on the phone, and I’m glad to hear her voice. So I will try to figure out how to gently put into words the overpowering feeling I have more and more as I walk through middle age: I don’t have time for this.”

She goes on to talk about how her son was a Sandy Hook student who was a few doors down from the shooting and survived and how that gave her new perspective on how precious time is and how it isn’t guaranteed. So, she chooses to focus on the joy in her life and not wallow in the misery. Not sticking her head in the sand but choosing joy in her every day life.

So what could this possibly have to do with me writing about social media? Well, here’s where my brain went. Life is precious. We get our particular amount of time on this planet and then it’s done. I’ll turn forty this year. What do I want to do with the rest of my time? How do I want to spend those limited minutes? Which led me to…

Do I want to spend my time searching for cute dog memes to post?

And secondly…

Do I want to contribute to using up YOUR minutes with trying to keep you looking at my page and distracting you from your life?

The answer felt really clear in that moment. I’m not here to distract you. I don’t want that to be part of my job. Yes, I want to write the best books I can, and some people might see reading romance as a distraction, but I see reading a good story as an experience or a chosen respite. Time reading a book rarely feels like wasted time to me—unless the book was terrible, lol. Even watching TV shows usually doesn’t feel like wasted time to me. A good story well told is something that makes me happier. But when I get lost in the internet hole of social media or random videos or top ten posts, I rarely feel better for it.

And frankly, with all my blogging about reclaiming focus and taking breaks from social media and doing device-free summers, it feels hypocritical of me to post fluff to keep algorithms fed and you seeing my page. Note: This is absolutely not a judgment of anyone who does post those things or the countless number of people who enjoy the content. My husband starts many of his days with cat videos because that gives him a happiness boost before he goes to work. There’s nothing wrong with that. This is not about what should be posted or shouldn’t. This is a personal decision about what I feel aligns with who I am and what I want to give you.

When you visit my blog or read my newsletter or see something on my Facebook page, I want you to feel like you’ve gotten something of value out of it. It doesn’t always have to be serious, of course. Despite the tone of this post, I’m not a particularly serious person. Fun and laughter have great value. But I also don’t want my contribution to be filler that I’m posting just to keep the algorithms happy and eyeballs on my sites. I want it to be things that aren’t on a million other pages. My goal for my blog is for you to walk away with something to think about or a great book recommendation or a new TV show to try out. My goal for my newsletter is to make it good enough that people would actually pay to subscribe to it (I’m not going to charge, don’t worry. But that’s how I judge how much I like a newsletter: would I pay a subscription fee for this?)

Basically, I want to add value not distract.

And yes, of course I want you to buy my books. I really, really do! :) My family likes to eat and, you know, have a roof over our heads and stuff. (So high maintenance!) But I have to believe that if I put everything I have into writing quality stories (which involves me concentrating and not spending too much time on social media either) that you will still buy my books—even if I’m not constantly in your feed reminding you that I’m alive and have something to sell.

How about this? I work to give you good things to read and aim not to waste your time. You occasionally buy one of my books and tell your friends to read them. Deal? ;)

My promise to you:

1. I won’t blog unless I feel I have something interesting to talk about or offer you.

2. My newsletter will remain focused on providing you with quality content. It’s full of these posts plus extra content including what I’m reading, what books I’ve bought lately, and behind the scenes photos.

3. All book recommendations on this blog or any of my social media channels will continue to be non-sponsored content. I don’t accept books for review, so anything I recommend is being recommended because I enjoyed it.

4. I will continue to write the best stories I can (which sometimes means being a slacker on social media.)

5. I will do my best not to waste your time and will be grateful for any time you choose to share with me.

Thank you for being here.

And if you want to keep up with my posts along with exclusive content, sign up for my newsletter. This is, by far, the easiest way to keep up with me, no social media checking required.

Have a great weekend!

What newsletter would you pay for? I’m always looking for great new ones to check out. :)

Roni Recommends - Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

I know it’s going to come as no surprise that I love reading productivity books, but because I read so many, it’s often hard to find one that stands out. A lot of them are just more of the same. This is actually why I didn’t buy the book I’m recommending today when it first came out. The summary looked a lot like other books I’d read and so I passed it by. However, when I saw it recommended somewhere else, I decided to give it another look. I’m so glad I did.

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky was a delight to read. First off, it’s just a really nice physical book. Book nerds (like me) will appreciate how thick the paper is, and the layout and design of the pages makes it super easy to read. There are also a lot of fun little illustrations. It almost feels like reading a really great blog on paper. So, though I have nothing against ebooks, you might want to spring for the hardcover on this one.

As for the content inside, the book focuses on how to make time using a simple paradigm which involves choosing a highlight for the day, learning how to laser focus on it, reflecting on how it went, and also making sure you have enough daily energy to get things done. Sounds simple enough, but what I enjoyed about the format of the book was that the authors take each of the four areas in the paradigm and give you a bunch of different tactics to choose from to help implement it.

For instance, in the Laser section, there are over 40 separate tactics they describe that can help you focus better. Things like how to make your phone screen distraction free. (I’m trying a version of this, see pic) or how to wrangle TV time or finding a soundtrack for “flow.” It’s a choose-your-own-adventure style. They’re not saying “do all these things.” They’re saying, here are a bunch of ways you might try. Experiment with combinations and see what works for you.

I found the Highlight, Laser, and Reflection sections really helpful and thought-provoking. I wasn’t as into the Energy section just because I’d rather read advice on eating, exercise, etc. from experts in those particular fields. (Though I did enjoy the tactics about caffeine.)

Overall, this was a quick read that I thoroughly enjoyed and will keep on my shelf. I love that you can just flip to a tactic for a refresh. It really is like having a helpful blog bound into a book. So if you’re looking for a productivity book that is fast-paced, fun, and helpful, you might want to give this one a try.

Here is the official description:

From the New York Times bestselling authors of Sprint, a simple 4-step system for improving focus, finding greater joy in your work, and getting more out of every day.

Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, "The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!" or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I'll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that's exactly what we do. Why?

In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people's priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position. But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn't mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That's what this book is about.

As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles.

Make Time isn't about productivity, or checking off more to-dos. Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction.

A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day..., Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.

Buy the book

Training my Brain for Deep Work: Two and a Half Years In

Two and a half years ago, I blogged about reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work for the first time. At the time, I was feeling so scattered and distracted that I was legitimately concerned that I was developing some sort of memory problem or attention disorder. Reading Deep Work made me realize that it wasn’t a medical problem, it was an environmental problem. I had set up my life (as most of us have these days) with a constant flow of distractions: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, and the endless pings of notifications.

My phone was always with me, demanding my attention with every notification ding or little red bubble. When I was working on my computer, little notification boxes appeared in the corner for every email or mention on social media. Now, I think about how things were set up, and it seems ludicrous—that I let myself be inundated like that. But at the time, it just seemed like the way of things. That state is the default these apps put me (and you) on.

Then I read Deep Work in August of 2016. That book shifted my view of the digital world dramatically, and it really sent me into a deep dive on the topic. I went on to read a stack of books about the internet, social media, video games, the brain and distraction. That eventually led to me doing things like Device-Free Summer with kidlet in the summer of 2017 (and 2018), which truly was and continues to be life-changing for my kiddo and our family. And it’s also led me down a path of dialing back my own distractions step by step.

My own journey from scattered distraction to deliberate focus has been a two and a half year process. One thing I love about blogging is that I can look back on old posts and see what I was thinking/going through in the past. Reading that 2016 post is like reading about another person. So much has changed since I wrote that initial post, but it definitely hasn’t been an overnight change.

I can’t quite remember the order of all the phases I went through, but here were some stops along the journey:

• Turned off all sound notifications on both my phone and computer except for phone calls and texts.

• Turned off all visual pop up notifications.

• Turned off those red badge icons that tell you how many notifications you have.

• Deleted Tweetdeck which used to stay open all the time.

• Deleted Twitter from my phone.

• Basically abandoned Twitter - I just post news and blog links and respond to people who comment to me or message me directly. I no longer read my feed.

• Unsubscribed from social media emails that notify you that someone has commented or messaged you.

• Put a message on my FB messenger letting people know that I don’t check it and to email me if you need me.

• I downloaded the Hey Focus app, which blocks the internet/social media for a set amount of time.

• Started making a conscious effort not to pick up my phone in every idle moment.

• I bought a bigger purse and a Book Beau so that I’m always carrying a book or my Kindle with me so that when I do have idle moments, I pick up a book instead of my phone.

• Moved my social media apps into a folder on my phone on the last page instead of having them quickly accessible on the first page. (Right now they’re deleted completely because of the social media break.)

• Moved the apps I want to be using (Kindle, podcasts, New York Times) to my first phone page.

• Stopped watching the news (and getting news from Twitter) and subscribed to a paid, vetted news app (New York Times for me) and subscribed to a physical copy of the local newspaper.

• Made extensive email rules to farm out non-urgent, distracting emails/newsletters into folders so that I can choose when I go through them.

• Most recently, I’m in the middle of a 30-Day Social Media break after reading Cal’s newest book Digital Minimalism. I’m a little over two weeks into no social media at all, and I’ll update at the end of the 30-days how that experiences has been.

So those are some of the things I’ve done. Each one has brought me a step closer to reclaiming my ability to focus. But the reason why I’m writing about this today is because I had a bit of an epiphany yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, I was hard at work on writing lectures for the online writing classes I’m about to launch. I had designated the afternoon for writing because that’s when I tend to do my best work. So after lunch, I put on my Focus @ Will music (that link will get you a 20 dollar credit to try it out if you’re interested) and got to work. Normal day. However, when I was done, I looked up and realized I’d written 5600 words and had been working for four hours straight with only a brief bathroom and coffee refill break. I’d been in a mental “flow” state for hours.

This has happened on occasion, of course. There are great writing days, good ones, and bad ones. However, lately, particularly during the two weeks of this social media fast, this is becoming the norm and not the anomaly. The week of the 11th, I wrote almost 18k words in four days. I am not a fast writer, y’all. A great week for me is 10k words. But that week, I basically wrote off the high word count as a quirk. Yesterday it finally hit me that—wait, it wasn’t a quirk. I’m doing it.

What is it? Well, in my initial post about Deep Work, I mentioned this point:

Deep focus can generally only be maintained for a certain amount of time - The author suggest that those just starting out, an hour a day of deep work might be all they can manage. But with practice, he said that people can do 3-4 hours of deep work in a day--which means that you're still going to have time to get the shallow stuff done.

At the time of that post, I was aiming for that one hour. I used to set my Hey Focus app for 25 minute bursts. Newport had suggested that 4 hours is about the limit for deep work before our brains are worn out, so I wasn’t even considering that amount of time. Focusing for four hours straight seemed a near impossible feat. But now, I’m doing it. Regularly. I’m not even using the Hey Focus app anymore. I don’t have to block the internet or my access to anything. My brain just knows once I start my Focus @ Will music, okay, now it’s time to work.

I think my last hurdle was the social media thing because even though I had turned off all notifications, I still would hop over to Facebook groups and such when I hit a snag in my writing or got stuck. While on this social media break, I don’t have that option, so there’s nowhere to go if I hit a snag. I either have to work through it or get up and walk around for a little while to think. Now, I don’t plan to quit social media for good, but after this experiment, I’m going to make some big changes, which I’ll discuss in a future post when I’m done with the 30-day fast/digital declutter.

My main point is that, yes, you can retrain your distracted brain (that is, assuming you don’t have a legitimate attention disorder or medical condition.) This was not a quick fix, and it wasn’t easy because breaking habits/distraction addiction is serious business. (I definitely felt this the first week of this social media fast. The lack of regular dopamine hits is real.) This was a step by step journey over 2.5 years. And I don’t doubt that I still have more to do on this road. However, I find it super exciting and empowering that we can take our brains back. Focusing really can be a superpower, especially in our current world where we’re all battling unprecedented levels of distraction.

So if you’re feeling like I was back in 2016, make a plan to wrestle back your focus. You can use some of the techniques I’ve listed above. I also highly recommend you read Deep Work and/or Digital Minimalism.

The first step in this process is getting over the resistance that’s going to crop up in the form of arguments as to why you are different from all these other people dialing back their online/social media time and can’t possibly dial things back. Here are some things your “don’t take away my fix” reflex may argue:

• I would do this, but I can’t not check my Facebook throughout the day because it’s part of my job. (It’s part of my job too, but I can corral it into a time slot. You have a job to do, and unless you’re a social media manager, you job is not “be available 24/7 on FB or Twitter.”)

• If I’m not on Twitter, I won’t be up to date on the news. (Breaking news has caused a lot of trouble over the last few years. Find a news source you respect and trust and get the well thought-out take after the actual facts have been gathered, which means you don’t need to check it more than once a day.)

• If I don’t get pop up notifications, I’ll miss something important. (Keep notifications on phone calls and texts from family and such. Those are where the emergencies will come in. Everything else can be checked on a schedule, including email. If you have a boss you have to respond to immediately on email, give them a notification sound but leave the others silent. Or make a schedule to check your email at the end of each work hour.)

• If I’m not on every social platform, I’ll be behind. (Doing them all well is nearly impossible. Focus on the one or two that you like.)

• If I don’t respond to someone within 5 seconds, they’ll be mad. (You teach people how to treat you. I have taught people that I’m not immediately available unless it’s an emergency or something truly urgent. If I respect my time, other people will too.)

• If I don’t post on Instagram (or insert favorite social media) every day, people will wonder where I’m at. (None of us are that important. People will survive if we don’t post every day.)

• Facebook is how I keep in touch my family and friends who I don’t see. (Totally cool. That doesn’t mean you have to be available to them 24 hours a day. Check it in the morning and in the evening in a time-limited way.)

My friend (and writing process guru), Becca Syme, has a saying she throws at us all the time: Question the premise. She usually means that in reference to writing advice people give you. However, it applies here as well. If those excuses above or others crop up, question the premise. Is that really true? Is there really no way around that distraction? Is there really no way to change that situation to where it benefits my focus? I promise that if you really want to make a change and improve things, you can. There’s a way.

I will step off my soapbox now, but I hope you’ve found some of this helpful. I’m only this passionate about this topic because I’ve seen it work—both for me and my kidlet. It’s life-changing stuff! : )

Let me know if you’re struggling with distractions or if you’ve tried anything to improve your focus. I’d love to hear! Leave your thoughts in the comments. (If you leave them on my social media, I won’t see them until the end of the fast, lol.)

The Digital Declutter & Why I'm Taking a 30-Day Social Media Break

If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you know that one of my favorite topics to explore and evaluate is our relationship with devices, the internet, and social media. For two summers, we’ve done device-free summer with kidlet and have had a lot of success with that (he even requested to have one last summer when I wasn’t planning on it.) It truly changed my kid. I realized today I don’t even know where his Ipad went. I haven’t seen it in almost a year. He used to be attached to that thing. And video games, which had hooked him hard, are now played as an afterthought and for hardly any time at all. He now complains to me that all the kids at school want to talk about is Fortnight—a game he’s never played and has no interest in playing. So I’m a believer in the digital detox or break, or in this case, declutter.

Unlike kidlet, I haven’t gone device-free, but I’ve done a number of things over the years to curtail my constant need to check my phone and other things on the internet so that I can focus and get my writing (aka deep work) done. I’m constantly refining my process. So when I heard Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, was coming out with a new book called Digital Minimalism, you know I was pre-ordering that thing as fast I could click. The book released this week, and I’m almost all the way through it. I’ll probably give a more thorough review once I’m done, but it’s already inspired me to try his method of a 30-Day Digital Declutter.

This isn’t a detox per se. It’s more of a swipe the slate clean of all your social media (and other digital distractions that may suck up your time like video games or too much TV streaming), see how you feel for 30 days. And then, after thirty days, scrutinize each app or service carefully to decide whether or not you want to add it back into your life.

I don’t anticipate that I will give up all social media after this. For one, it’s part of my job. However, I am looking forward to breaking my cycle of check, check, checking my phone in the bored moments or when I first wake up. I had already deleted Twitter off of my phone a few months ago and haven’t felt the need to add it back. For this thirty day stretch, I’m deleting Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest off my phone as well. I also won’t be checking these sites on my desktop. No social media. Period.

My plan is to post the graphic at the top of this post on all my social media channels, letting people know why I’m not responding, and then will step fully away for the month. During this time, I plan to continue to blog and send out my newsletter, so I’m not going off the grid, just social media.

I’m interested to see how my attention shifts during the month and how this will all make me feel. Will I have the itch to check? Will I feel calmer because I don’t have to check? Will I feel out of the loop? Will I get more work done? Will I fill that time with something better or something equally as distracting? I love an experiment, so I’m looking forward to finding out!

As always, I’ll report how things went after the month is up (or maybe even along the way). And if anyone is interested in doing something similar, you can check out the details of the Digital Declutter in Digital Minimalism.

UPDATE: After the 30-Day Social Media Ban: What Surprised Me and What I’m Changing and also Training My Brain For Deep Work: Two and Half Years In

Interested in this topic?

Here’s a list of other posts I’ve done about devices and digital distractions:

• A Screen-Free Summer for Kidlet: How, Why, & If I'll Lose My Mind

• The 10-Day Update 

• 5 Week Update on Screen-Free Summer

• The End of Our Screen-Free Summer: Results and Moving Forward

• The After-Effects of Our Device-Free Summer

• Device-Free Summer 2.0: Why We’re Doing This Again

• 7 Things to Reduce Distractions and Increase Focus

• On Productivity and Distraction: Deep Work

• Revisiting Deep Work

• Stop Letting Your Inbox Distract You: Making Rules Work For You

Stop Letting Your Inbox Distract You: Making Rules Work for You

I talk about productivity often on this blog and that means I often end up talking about avoiding distractions. I’ve blogged before about taming social media and how I use Hey Focus and block distracting sites when I’m writing. However, one major distraction I haven’t covered before is email. Why? Because I hadn’t figured out how NOT to be distracted by it except to close it and only check it at certain times. But that has some issues if you’re waiting for important emails.

So this is what email distraction usually looks like for me.

*Sits at my computer*

“Okay, before I get started on anything, let me check my email to see if there’s anything urgent I need to take care of.”

Maybe gets one or two emails that need quick action.

Then the pretty, shiny emails stare back at me. Ooh, these books are on sale. Ooh, this is a list of the best planners. Ooh, this is an interesting article about writing. Ooh, Audible’s got 100 books on sale, I should click and scan that list. Ooh, someone’s commented on my facebook post.

Two hours later…no real work has gotten done.

Does this sound familiar to anyone else?

It was getting bad for me. And, worse, it often felt like I was being productive because a lot of what I was reading from my email was educational. If anyone is familiar with the Strengthsfinder personality test, my top two strengths are Learner and Input. This basically means that I want to learn all the things about all the things and want constant input to get my brain going. Those superpowers can be used for good, but they also are the same ones that lead me down the email rabbit hole of click click click.

So, a few months ago, I decided that something needed to change. I wasn’t doing well at avoiding. If I saw it in my inbox, I wanted to click. I knew the only way that has worked for me in the past on other distracting things is the “out of sight, out of mind” approach. I didn’t want to unsubscribe from everything. I do learn things and get inspiration from articles and posts and other people’s newsletters. But I need to control how and when I saw it. Enter the magic of email rules.

Email rules are nothing new, and I’d used them on occasion for minor things, but I’d never looked at them as a way to truly take control of my inbox. Before now, I’ve always relied on organizing by folders—but folders that I used after the fact. Like a receipt would come to my inbox, and I would manually file it away in the receipts folder. That’s not helping with the flow of incoming email.

So I decided to really go after the problem with rules. I set up folders for the main categories of things that come into my inbox. This will be different for everyone, but here are mine.

Categorizing

• All the Input - This includes all the non-bookish newsletters, article round ups, the New York Times newsletters, what’s new on Netflix and Hulu, announcements of local concerts and events, the local newspaper’s newsletters, blogs I subscribe to, etc. Basically, all the things I love to read and feed my brain with but that aren’t urgent.

• Bookish Things - This includes Daily deal book emails, bookish blogs, newsletters from BookPage, B&N, Audible, BookBub, Goodreads. I separate these out from the input folder because they include time-sensitive deals. So it’s something that I want to check daily, but that I know I need to check at a break time because it will suck up time to scan lists of what’s on sale.

• Promotions - This is where all the coupon emails go from stores I’ve subscribed to. Good news is I don’t even have to look at these. They are just stored there in case I find myself in a particular store and need a coupon. I don’t have to be distracted by—oh what is this new thing this store wants me to buy?

• Social Media - This is where all the facebook and other social media notifications go. This is also one that used to clutter up my inbox, but now I barely have to look at. And it’s an easy “select all” and “delete” at the end of the week.

• Planners - Because I’m a planner nerd, I separate out the emails from all the planner companies into one folder.

• Book Notes - I used the Pensieve app to send quick notes to myself when I get an idea about my book and am away from my computer. So this one is more a storage system than avoidance distraction.

How does this work?

You set up all your rules in your email system. I’m sure every program is a little different, but this is what it looks like in Apple Mail. This will take a while because you’re tackling your whole inbox. Bring snacks. You’re going to have to go through and see exactly what you’re getting, what address it comes from, and what folder you want to auto-send it to. Then you set up your rules and just start adding all those addresses. If you are using apple mail, if you highlight an email, click Mail—>Preferences—>Rules it will auto-populate the email address when you start a rule or add to an existing one, which makes things quicker.

This is what my rule looks like for the Bookish Things folder:

This can feel like a painstaking process, but once you get through the tedium of it, you’re all set. When your emails comes in, it will automatically sort into these folders. So you never have to see it until you click on that folder. All you will get in your main inbox are the emails that you want to see or need to see. I’ve kept my main inbox to where I get emails from my family, my publisher, my editor, my agent, my kid’s school, and emails from my website. Also, any emails from new sources will land there as well.

How has this new system changed things?

I can’t explain how big of a difference this has made for me. It truly is an out of sight, out of mind solution for me. I see the little numbers of new emails in those folders in the morning, but I KNOW they aren’t urgent, so I don’t have to check those folders “just in case”. I know I can leave them alone, and they will be waiting when I get time to take a break. It also gives me comfort that I’m not missing anything important in my main inbox because I can leave that box open.

And maintenance on this system is easy because when you get a new email from a company or sign up for a new newsletter, you just have to click and add it to an already existing rule. Done. The folders and rules even work on my phone, which is amazing. It’s email magic. : )

So, if you find yourself getting lost in the black hole of email during the day, maybe give this a try. It’s nice to sit down in the morning and not have a giant pile of email to sort through. You can take care of what you need to take care of and then move on.

Anyone else sucked in by the email beast? What do you do to tame it? What would your folders be named?

Other posts on Distraction:

7 Things to Reduce Distractions and Increase Focus

On Productivity and Distraction: Deep Work

Revisiting Deep Work

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