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.
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- 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?
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