Top Tips for Staying Focused at Work

There has always been distractions for work, and there have probably been times when everyone that works has had trouble staying focused. TechQuarters provides business IT support London companies have been using for over a decade now. They discussed with us their top tips on how to stay focused at work.

Organise your workspace

TechQuarters, like many IT support companies, have been helping their customers transition to remote and hybrid working – they know the challenges of working from home; one of the biggest is that many users won’t have a professional workspace available at home, which can be distracting. The first and easiest step to take is to keep your workspace neat and well organised. When you have a nice, clear space, and everything is organised in a predictable way, your brain won’t have to worry about that aspect, and can focus more completely on your work.

Organizing your workspace isn’t just about keeping it clear. It can be handy to have something to make notes on, like a notepad or sticky notes. Additionally, having your phone lying on your desk can be a distraction – we all get tempted to pick up our phone to see if we have any notifications. A good solution can be to get a stand to prop your phone up and put it somewhere out of the way – that way it’s not in your immediate workspace, but you can glance over to check if you’ve had any notifications that require your attention.

Filter Notifications

Leading on from the last point, notifications can easily distract you from your work; emails, texts, social media – these are just a few types of notifications that can pop-up on your desktop or your phone and distract you. Everyone is guilty of getting distracted by random notifications. For this reason, it is recommended to filter notifications.

As well as providing IT support services, TechQuarters also provide Microsoft licensing, and have many great tips on how to use Microsoft products to stay focused. Their top tip for avoiding distracting notifications on a Windows PC is to enable Focus Assist, which will block any non-priority or emergency notifications – this way, you know that the only notifications that grab your attention will be the important ones. There are similar solutions available for smartphones.

Avoid Distracting Apps

Everyone has that one app that demands far too much of their attention. It may be a social media app, or perhaps it’s a website like YouTube or Reddit that you look at on your browser. It may feel like you’ve only spent 30 seconds checking that app or website, but that can easily turn into 30 minutes.

A good solution is to manually restrict access to those attention draining apps and websites. For instance, on iPhones, you can set limits on how much time you spend on apps. Similarly, there are browser extensions that can restrict access to websites between set times periods.