For me, I find the most productive time is when I work without any connection to the internet. It helps me focus my energy on thinking and planning, reduces my temptations to randomly check things online, not chat, and waste time. This only works if you are a knowledge or office worker. I go so far as to sometimes travel on planes, trains, or extremely remote places where there is no internet access. I used to spend 3 days a week in the redwood forest in Santa Cruz so I could just learn, study, and plan. If I can’t go to these extreme modes of traveling, I will just put my computer on airplane mode to simulate this. The key is you must be off the internet, it doesn’t count if you go into “work beast mode”. You don’t want temptations to pop up in your mind. Every time you go online to get some information you think you need, you need to put your guard up to defend yourself from all the widgets and popups trying to steal your attention, its draining and just not worth it. For any communications I need to do, I queue it up. For example I will write all my emails, slacks, etc into a doc and then send them all out in bulk when I get back online. I set daily and weekly pockets of time where I can go into airplane mode so I have times of intense focus and then other times or communicating and managing projects with my colleagues. Most people will have an excuse that they need online access to data to get their work done, and in many cases this is true, but there is always a way around it. Download copies of the data beforehand or keep a local copy. Most software these days is built with an always online philosophy, so they won’t work if you go offline, I’ve built many processes to get around this, but the main one is to have a notes queue to process when you get back online. If you are an office worker, you must find time to do something like this, it will help you drive focus in any area you want to drive focus or clarity.
