To find yourself scrolling through Instagram every five minutes, it might be effective to block that website, from your phone or from your computer. Those are great ways to make sure you won't be checking those social media accounts. Or you can even consider deleting all the apps from your phone. By doing this, you are absolutely sure you won't be checking social media. During your focusing sessions. There are a few apps and browser extensions that allow you to block certain websites from your computer, and you should not fear using them because they exist to help us focus.
When writing a blog post or a script or a class. I use an app on my computer called cold turkey writer you set the amount of time you want to write for or you can set the maximum number of words you have to write and you can leave the app until you achieve the goal you set. literally the only way to stop is to turn off your computer which takes A lot of time and pretty much no one is willing to do it. And so it's the best way for me to stay 100% focused when I'm writing, because I'm not checking Facebook and I'm not opening other random YouTube videos. So what about your phone? What can you do to stop checking your phone while you weren't working?
For me, I usually do one of these two things. The first one is I put my phone away. So when I work, I usually put my phone in another room, which guarantees that I'm not going to check it, because I'm not going to get up just to check Instagram. Other times I block the use of my phone using an app called forest. In reality, the app doesn't allow you to block the use of your phone, but it works extraordinarily well. So you set a timer for the amount of time you want to focus on and you plant a seed.
If you don't leave the app until the timer goes off, you grow a tree in your garden, but if you leave that Apple before the focusing session ends, your tree dies. And so you will have a dark tree in your garden. This is kind of a game and the app doesn't really allow you to block the use of your your phone, but it works extremely well because I never want to have a bad tree in my garden. And I think that for more than two years, I only have two that trees in my garden. Yes, you can leave your phone in another room and I do it a lot of times. But sometimes it's also fun to see your tree growing as you keep working without checking social media.
Most of the times during my focusing sessions, a lot of things pop up in my mind to fight the urge to deal with them very quickly. I write them in a piece of paper. This helps me to maintain my focus in to relax my brain. Because if certainly during your focusing session, your mind is telling you you should be answering that message. You should be doing that you should be real Quickly giving you a look on Instagram, your mind will trick you to make you feel that you really need to deal with those urgent things very quickly. And it won't even take that much time.
So a great way to avoid falling into this trap is to writing all of those things that pop up in your mind. Sometimes I end my focusing sessions with zero things on the paper. And other times I have things like answer the text message, check my email, answer that email, or even check sales, like book sales, because I'm always buying new books. And sometimes I'm like, Oh my god, I really need to check that sale of that website or anything. But I write those things down, because I don't have to check them right now. So I can check them later.
And they write them in a piece of paper to kind of relax my brain a few years ago, if those things were popping up in my mind during my focusing sessions, I would stop what I was doing and I would just deal with them. But as we know, focusing is not about that focusing is just about focusing in one single thing at a time. So write the things that are distracting you in a piece of paper and deal with them later. This is a great way to avoid switching from one task to another, which is something that we are very used to do, but we know it causes brain fatigue and it makes us more tired and with less energy, so we'll avoid this at all costs.