Tips for bloggers to not get distracted

Pic by aparejador

Everyday while starting to browse we start off with a few works-to-do in our head.

But somehow we get trapped in chatting, twiting and all other stuff and the work that really matter to us gets delayed or worse, we postpone it for tomorrow (and you know the rest).

Let us look at few simple ideas to avoid this and be productive. All it needs is an hour or two for planning and execution and then you are all set to go forever.

Basic thumbrules while being online.
ThumbRule 1: Remove distractions from your field of vision.
ThumbRule 2: Put yourself in a place where people won't find/disturb you.

• Clean Desktop
Never clutter your desktop. Apart from the essential shortcuts and folders there shouldn't be anything else. Remove unnecessary gadgets, desktop enhancement widgets.

KISS(Keep It Simple Stupid) works great for this. Create folders based on the works you ought to attend regularly to in the desktop.


• Visual Peg
Choose a wallpaper that you like and have some affirming words on it. I have my wallpaper saying "If not now, when? If not you, who?".

Simple but many a times have saved me from just squandering my time watching videos, reading news and stuff.

This helps to curb distractions from the moment you login to your console.


• No Ads
If you use firefox or opera, this becomes easier. Use Adblock plus addon(Firefox) or turn the cached image mode(opera) to turn off image ads which becomes distractive and which you might tend to click on.

When reading articles or reading feeds or gathering material for your blog, you would realize how helpful this is.


• Online Tools
It is always better to be in one window to not get distracted than toggling many windows. As a blogger, browser is our world and the momentum reduces while switching between apps and you tend to lose focus while being online.

There are excellent online tools for everything that is offline, find them and you would love them.

Example, say using Fireshot for screenshots than other tools. Using online mail services and not pop3 or other mail clients.

This is useful when you are working online. There are apps which you might like to use, I don't mean them. For blogging related activities there are better online tools.


• Careful First Step
To help you be productive always and to keep your world clean, be careful in the first action you do with any services online.

Don't reveal the working mail id while subscribing to avoid clutter. Avoid subsciptions where it can be avoided.

Some softwares have the nasty habit of installing unnecessary toolbars, be careful while installing them.

Updates on new followers in Twitter, Facebook etc., could be avoided.

Keeping the default status in chats as busy/unavailable is an intelligent move.

These are some of the basic steps that needs to be taken to be focussed while blogging and to achieve more in little time.

All that needs to be done is finding good services available online, changing default settings of the services we are using, cleaning the desktop and organizing it and a plan for each day of what to be done.

It would hardly take an hour or so.

For sure, you would have some ideas or ways to keep yourself productive without getting distracted online. Post your ideas as comments here. Eager to know what you do.