Social networks can be destructive but also constructive!

There are moments you have to force yourself to focus on your work for a few consecutive hours. If you constantly get disrupted, your efficacy will decrease significantly and you cannot accomplish a task in your desired timeline. One way to focus on work that I’ve found useful is to put the phone away, somewhere outside of your sight to avoid being distracted by new notifications and messages you receive. Additionally, I have disabled different notifications on my laptop except some of the critical Slack channels, and I have also silenced my phone and my laptop. These have incredibly increased my focus since I started this habit.

However, checking social network between your work is not always a bad idea; sometimes you need to procrastinate. It might sound weird, but sometimes there are ideas that need to be developed in your brain until it reaches a critical point that you are able to start implementing them. These situations often happen to me while I am struggling to start a task (e.g. writing) and my brain does not always cooperate. I have realized staring at the screen for half an hour is not necessarily the best solution. I need to divert my attention to something else. Reading news or articles shared on Facebook/Twitter or even looking at some photos on Instagram might fire some of my brain cells and cause a useful perturbation. But you need to be careful not to be drowned in the world of social network! Choose the right time to switch back to work!

I took this photo at the national museum of art in Tokyo.