How to stay focused at work: block the pings, then catch the urge

Two kinds of pull

The first kind comes from outside: a Slack ping, an email, a colleague at your desk. Everyone knows about these.

The second kind comes from inside. Laura Dabbish, Gloria Mark and Víctor González tracked over 5,000 task switches by people at work. Close to half of the interruptions that pulled people off their work came from the workers themselves. Nobody pinged them. They just left.

Most focus advice only fights the first kind. That's why you can mute everything and still end up on your phone.

Turn down the outside

Start with the easy half. In a study by Gloria Mark and colleagues, people who were interrupted finished their work faster, but reported more stress and frustration. You can keep up with constant pings. You just pay for it.

So pick two or three set times a day for email and messages, and mute them in between. If your job needs faster replies, check once an hour instead of every few minutes.

Move your phone, too. When researchers at the London School of Economics filmed everyday phone use, 89% of pickups were started by the person, not a notification. Silent mode doesn't help with that. A drawer does.

And before you switch tasks, write one line about where you stopped. Management researcher Sophie Leroy found that part of your attention stays stuck on an unfinished task after you leave it. She called it attention residue. One line helps your brain let go.

Know what you meant to do

You can only notice you've drifted if you know where you meant to be. So plan tomorrow tonight, with your hardest task first.

Cal Newport, who wrote Deep Work, blocks out each day the evening before, giving every block a specific job. He calls the hard, important work deep work: "the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task." It needs your best hours, which for most people means the morning.

Our full guide is time blocking. And if your day fills up with useful-looking busy work, read the distraction that looks like work. If focus is hard for a reason you can't place, start with why you can't focus.

Catch the inside

Now the hard half. The urge to leave usually arrives when the task feels boring, stuck or scary. Nir Eyal calls this the internal trigger, and no amount of muting stops it.

What helps is catching it. When you feel the pull, name the feeling in one word, give it a minute, and go back. And take real breaks. In a Rutgers experiment with 414 people, those who spent their break on a phone did worse afterwards than those who took the same break without one.

Try it with your next hour. Pick one task and write what "done" looks like. Mute Slack and email for 50 minutes and set a status: "Focusing, back at 11." Put your phone in a drawer. Start a focus timer, and when the urge hits, name it before you act.

That last step is the one CatchScroll is built for. When the urge hits, tap the feeling, take a two-minute reset made for it, and go back to your block.

For the longer, absorbed kind of focus, read how to get into flow state.

So, which pull gets you most: the pings, or the urge?