The easiest way for me to not fiddle with my Pokémon cards all the time is to move them where I can’t see them—but there are degrees to this practice.
In my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house, I only keep what needs immediate attention on my desk. Cards I still need to sleeve to protect them, for example. Everything else goes on a shelf with a shutter. I pull down the lid, and *poof* gone from my mind are the cards.
The more valuable, sealed items are in the basement. I might keep some upstairs for display, but if it’s not meant to be touched or sold for years to come, why look at it every day? So even further away they go!
The best part of this strategy, however, is leaving my parents’ house and going back to my own apartment. What’s not in the house at all can’t possibly be meddled with!
This idea of keeping distractions at arm’s length is intuitive enough with physical items, like your phone, food, or video game controller, but even then most people don’t consider it when designing their everyday environment. Where it really gets interesting, however, is in the realm of the digital.
Instead of having your desktop screen cluttered with icons, why don’t you throw them all into a single folder? It’ll give you a sense of peace when you look at it and force you to be more deliberate in what you’re looking for. Rather than enabling email notifications, force yourself to open the app first.
And, my latest stroke of genius: Move entire sections of browser bookmarks into Evernote, where they are less accessible. Chrome suggests your bookmark links whenever you type into the URL bar. But if you don’t want to be distracted by personal links popping up as you work, why not keep those links in a different context altogether? A note with URLs does just as well but won’t permeate your entire browsing experience.
Be they digital or physical: Move distractions further away. Remove what’s not essential so your attention can more easily hold on to what is.
