Productivity Hack – 01 – Stay Focused

Focus is very important for anyone to successfully accomplish a goal. A distracted person is his/her own biggest obstacle. It’s very easy to get distracted in today’s hyper-connected world. Following is a quick hack. Try it out to Stay Focused

1. Block social media sites from your laptop/desktop. Steps below.
2. Block your go-to news sites from your laptop/desktop. Since you would still like to be abreast of what’s happening in the world, Use Google News or Yahoo News to send you a news digest on email once a day/week.
3. Uninstall Whatsapp or other chatting messengers.
4. Disable all notifications on your phone and keep it in your pocket or bag. Share your desk number to colleagues.
5. Disable all new email notifications.

The idea is this – For that remote possibility that you ‘may’ miss something important, you stay connected with the phone all the time and get distracted all the time. It is not necessary. Force yourself to be without the phone and distractions for some periods to get into your productive zone. Or if you really want the calling facility due to your profession, take an alternate number on a feature phone. When you really have to access social media or phone, you can still do so using the phone from your bag. But by hiding it away in pocket or bag, you make it harder for yourself to access it and in most likelihood, you won’t use it unnecessarily.

The following are the steps to disable websites from your Windows laptops/desktops. This uses a trick to redirect the websites to a local address 127.0.0.1 which doesn’t exist. So, when you try to access the social media/news sites, you will get a Website not found page.

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator.
2. cd c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc
3. notepad hosts
4. In the hosts file, redirect the websites needed by adding the following line –

127.0.0.1       www.facebook.com

The above line means that whenever you try to access Facebook, it will redirect you to 127. 0.0.1. This is your localhost page on your machine which doesn’t exist

Also read, Productivity Hack – 02 – Improvise

ONE LIFE. LIVE BOUNDLESS.