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If you want to get stuff done, if you want to work less hours and earn more money,

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you need to deal with the distractions that surround you everyday. 

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The starting point for that is being aware of what they are,

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and boy are there a lot of them in the world of a web designer.

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There is instant messaging, there's Twitter, Facebook, RSS, web browsing, 

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email, phone calls. The whole environment can be distracting if it's not designed right.

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You need to take some active steps to remove those distractions.

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Otherwise you're going to find yourself working at midnight every night.

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Now if you're a night owl that might be perfectly fine,

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but you don't want to be working from 6 in the morning too.

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First thing you need to do is get rid of Twitter and Facebook.

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Don't have them constantly open.

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I know this is a stupid little thing, 

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but it makes a huge difference to the amount of time you work.

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I'll let you in on a secret. Most days I only work about 6-½ hours.

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Reason? Closing Facebook and Twitter.

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Well at least some of the time anyway.

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Keep your faffing activities to a minimum. 

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I don't even know if faffing is an American word you can understand,

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but I'm talking about things like RSS, web browsing, all of those things that you do

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as a distraction from what you should actually be doing.

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One of the ways of doing that is to isolate those activities 

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away from your work environment.

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So in other words, do your web browsing and your RSS feeds

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and your social networks and that kind of stuff—

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do it on your iPhone or your iPad, not on your work machine.

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Get them out of sight while you're trying to get stuff done.

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Another piece of advice when it comes to getting work done 

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is never try and multitask. It just doesn't work.

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We don't, as human beings, have the capability to multitask.

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Yes we can switch very fast from one task to another,

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but that's not the same.

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Moving from task to task will ultimately slow you down.

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If you're somebody that struggles to concentrate for a long length of time 

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like myself—I consider me to have the attention span of a small child—

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but the way I get round this problem is by working in sprints.

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There's something called the Pomodoro Technique which is really simple.

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You work for 25 minutes, you have a 5-minute rest,

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 and then you work for another 25 minutes.

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So you have 25 minutes solid on one task before moving to another.

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So it means that you can get significant work done.

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Talking of distractions, turn off those automatic notifications.

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I calculated, for example, that with the average email client like Outlook,

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on its default settings you will get interrupted 31,680 times per year

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by that little ping notification of a new email coming in.

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Now that is a huge amount of interruptions, 

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and let's be honest, every time it pings we have to go and look

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even though 90% of the time it's just spam and doesn't matter anyway.

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So turn off those notifications.

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You don't need to spend your whole life in your email client.

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Only answer the phone or check email or even IM at set times within the day. 

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That's why the sprints work quite well because you can have 

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certain sprints at certain times of the day for making phone calls or answering email

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or using IM.

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Now you might be getting a bit twitchy at this point.

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The thing is is closing email, not answering the phone, and not having IM on

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is very alien to us as web designers.

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We're used to being connected all the time,

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and most of us can't comprehend a world where we're not constantly checking email.

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What if a client has an urgent inquiry?

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What if they need me to do something right now?

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I can understand that and that fear of being out of touch,

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but the reality is is 90% of the communications that come in 

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are not time-sensitive.

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So all of those interruptions disrupt you from the work you should be doing,

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but for those 10% of communications that are urgent,

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I'd encourage you to look at various tools out there that help you manage it.

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For example, there is a tool called awayfind.com

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which basically allows you to identify certain emails that you know are urgent

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from a certain person or mentioning a certain keyword,

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and they will then forward those on as a notification to your phone.

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That way you don't need to have your email client open the whole time,

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and you will only be interrupted with the most vital of emails.

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There are also virtual services that will answer the telephone for you.

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For example, in the U.K. there is a service called moneypenny,

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but there are equal other services in various other countries 

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that provide the same service.

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What you do is you forward your phone number onto this,

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and a real person will answer the phone, take a message, 

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and will contact you if it's urgent.

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So there are ways where you can close down those distractions,

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where you can close down email and the things that interrupt you

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allowing you to get big chunks of work done without alienating clients

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and without getting all twitchy.