How to distract yourself from distraction?

Do you often get distracted? We all do! According to insidehighered.com, nearly half of the undergrad students are distracted by technology. Another survey from eab.com says, 97% of college students are distracted by their phones. And according to lifehack.org, nearly 3 out of 4 workers admit that they feel distracted from work. That’s a lot! Now, what if I told you that you can apply simple tricks in your daily life to not get distracted? But before that, let’s find out exactly what distraction is, and why we get distracted.

Distraction is "an action that moves us away from what we want in life," quoted by Nir Eyal, an Israeli-born American author, lecturer, and investor. Distraction is essentially when we get disrupted to do unnecessary things other than our work. This is a tremendous downside for us because we usually want to or need to finish the task at hand. Usually, we tell ourselves, "just five minutes" when we get distracted. But before we know it, those five minutes turn into half an hour. Let me tell you what happens to me a lot of times! I’m doing my homework, and barely five minutes into it, I get a text from my friend about a new album from BTS. I tell myself: “I’ll talk to her for only five minutes,” but as I keep texting, I end up talking to my friend for almost an hour. Then it’s time for dinner, and by the time I am done with dinner and helping my mom with chores, I’m tired, sleepy, and I still have some homework left to do. As I understand, this happens a lot to most of us.

How can we manage being sidetracked? How can we improve our focus? How can we get things done on time and still be able to enjoy? We can if we know how to deal with distractions properly and in a timely fashion. In other words, we need to help find ways to distract ourselves from the “distraction” itself. To deal with distraction, we need to figure out the triggers for distraction. There are internal and external triggers. A specific emotional state that we want to escape causes internal triggers. On the other hand, environmental factors cause external triggers (notifications, ads, etc.). Internal or external, they both drag us away from the task, affecting our focus and performance drastically.

Methods to Prevent Distraction:

• 10-minute rule: wait ten minutes and focus on your urge.

• Temperament: get rid of "self-limiting beliefs.”

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