SDS 572: Daily Habit #9: Avoiding Messages Until a Set Time Each Day

Podcast Guest: Jon Krohn

May 5, 2022

Welcome back to the Five-Minute Friday episode of the SuperDataScience Podcast!

Today, Jon returns with another productivity hack: blocking out email and social media notifications for a set time each day. 

 
For Jon, this time is 8:30 am to 10:30 am, which coincides with the start of his data science team’s daily stand-up meeting at his company Nebula.
This habit affords him two hours each morning, which he says are the most delightful hours of his workday. It allows him to focus deeply on the most urgent tasks of his day and gives him time to complete research for SuperDataScience podcast episodes, record videos for his YouTube channel, or write code to train a machine learning model.
Once he hits the 10:30 mark, meetings begin, and he starts tackling emails, Slack messages, and LinkedIn comments. The rest of his day can feel frazzled, with a lot of productivity-killing task-switching and often no more deep work until the evening when everyone else has seemingly signed off for the day.
While it might not be possible for you to say “no” to opening your email inbox until 10:30am, Jon still recommends giving yourself even half an hour or an hour of deeply focused work on the most urgent and important task of the day before cluttering your mind with what everyone else wants you to do. And if it can’t be done daily, perhaps even one or two days a week?
Try to find a way to experiment with this no-distractions approach to start your day — and you might find it invaluable and, frankly, rather enjoyable.

ITEMS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST:
DID YOU ENJOY THE PODCAST?

  • How can blocking out email and social media distractions for one hour or two help you gain more control, clarity and productivity in your day?
  • Download The Transcript

Podcast Transcript

(00:05):
This is Five-Minute Friday on Avoiding Email and Social Media Until a Set Time Each Day.

(00:27):
At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Then, we had a series of Five-Minute Fridays that revolved around daily habits and we’ve been returning to this daily-habit theme periodically since.
(00:44):
The habits we covered in January and February were related to my morning routine. In March, we began coverage of habits on intellectual stimulation and productivity, such as reading and carrying out a daily math or computer science exercise.
(00:56):
Today, we continue on with another productivity habit: That is, avoiding looking at — or even allowing notifications from — email or social media until a set time each day. For me personally, this time is 10:30am, which coincides with when I host my daily stand-up meeting with the data science team at my company Nebula, and which is typically the first meeting of my day.
(01:18):
While avoiding meetings and messages until 10:30am, I’m afforded with a roughly two-hour period each morning that is the most delightful and luxurious part of my workday. I can focus deeply on the most urgent and important tasks of the day. Check out Episode #456 by the way, for how I structure this deeply-focused work into blocks called pomodoros. So as examples of the kind of stuff that I can get done in this luxurious two-hour period each morning are stuff like researching for SuperDataScience Podcast episode, recording videos for my YouTube channel or writing code to train a machine learning model.
(01:51):
Once I hit the 10:30 mark, meetings begin, I start tackling emails, Slack messages, and LinkedIn comments. The rest of my day thereafter can feel frazzled, with a lot of productivity-killing task-switching and often no more deep work until the evening when everyone else has seemingly signed off for the day.
(02:09):
Depending on your role, it might not be possible to say “no” to opening your email inbox until 10:30am, but could you give yourself even half an hour or an hour of deeply focused work on the most urgent and important task of the day before cluttering your mind with what everyone else wants you to do? Or maybe it can’t be done every day of the week, but perhaps even on one day or two of them? Try to find a way to experiment with this no-distractions approach to the start of the day — I think you might find it invaluable and, frankly, rather enjoyable.
(02:39):
Like the other habits I’ve already covered in my Five-Minute Friday episodes on my daily habits, I choose to log my “no email or social media until 10:30am” habit as a binary habit — either I avoided my message platforms or I didn’t — so using the habit-tracking template I introduced in Episode #538, I set the min column for this particular habit’s row of the spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1. You can adapt this habit, particularly the specific threshold time to whatever suits you best.
(03:07):
All right, that’s it for today. Keep on rockin’ it out there, folks, and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience podcast with you very soon. 
Show All

Share on

Related Podcasts