Identity your timesinks

The completion of tasks and project is dependent upon the ability to focus. Unfortunately, a well defined sense of focus is not something that seems to come naturally to me, so I've looked at several strategies at controlling the activities which would distract me from tasks that I really want/need to accomplish. 

I'm clearly not the only one that has this problem. There are whole sections of Barnes & Noble on this topic and even more online resources on how to "Get Things Done" or "Do It Later" which should allow me to focus on the task at hand. This is great, for those with focus, but since I'm easily distractible, these strategies seem like step 2; I need step 1; which brings me to the meat of the discussion.

What are my distractions? There are lots, I'm not ashamed. 

• Work Email
• Personal Email
• Clash of Clans
• Reddit/Facebook/ESPN (hint: look at your browser history to find your time sinks)

I just took an unexpected 3 minute break to look at xkcd. Focus problems.

• Phone calls, walk up visitors, text messages and IMs

This is not a perfect system and will likely evolve over time as distractions come and go. What really matters is the framework used to address these distractions so they can identified and mitigated. 

1. Work Email: It's hard to avoid using work email. Unfortunately, it's the preferred means of communication in my organization. What I can do is manage the email and process it. Email should NOT be a tool used for archiving information, it's a means of transferring information. That information should be distilled someplace else (One Note, EverNote) and archived. I have a threefold to manage email: 
• Filters: get the irrelevant stuff out of your inbox, even if it's to a sub folder for later. 
• Timing part 1:  I took a strategy from my college professors and try to keep Office hours for email. 11am - 12:30pm and again at 3pm -4pm. This may or may not work for everyone, but it works well enough for me. 
• Timing part 2: I've applied this theory to our Corporate IM Service as well.  
2. Personal Email: We work 8-5, M-F. And most others do the same. So it's hard to not engage with other professionals during your working hours. While I'm guilty of checking this more often than I should, it's not a primary distraction. I limit my interactions to my iPad only, rather than looking on a workstation or laptop at work. This seems to work well enough. 
3. Clash of Clans: OMG this game is addicting. Its also a relatively huge distraction, just 5 min here, maybe a battle, how about I upgrade something or start a war. Arg. This app was banned from my iPhone. My iPad doesn't come out during the day, so it's out-of-sight--out-of-mind (mostly). 
4. Facebook/Reddit/ESPN: Especially with the World Cup the last two weeks, my web browsing hit an all-time high until Sunday night when I logged in and redirected those domains to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file. There is really no reason I should ever have to look here for the purposes of work, therefore I don't. Browsing on mobile devices or tablets is enough of an inconvenience as to keep mobile browsing at a minimum. 

I had previously listed other time sinks, but these 4 are the biggest obstacles to my productivity. The biggest game changers were management of email and web browsing. 

Some may think this is admitting defeat, but I tend to think this as a necessary strategy to enforce some control of how I work. The work still gets done and I've established some rules for how I work; proactive actions are better than reactive.