One of things that kept bugging me at work was a problem a lot of may be familiar with: switching contexts far too often. Colleagues come and ask questions, mails arrive, notifications pop up - a typical workday for me is often interrupted by various things, some more, some less important.

Of course, this immediately kills productivity and concentration especially as a developer - there's the one image describing it at its core:

As a result of this I was hardly able to really progress in my tasks and needed to turn this over again.

Keeping Focus

The approach I took was to take myself certain time blocks, typically either 30 or 45 minutes. Then I'd go along and do the following:

• disable notifications in macOS
• start a timer to keep track when time is up
• enable flight mode on my mobile
• ... and finally set /dnd mode in Slack and set my /status to indicate to my co-workers that I really don't want to be interrupted

It turned out to be quite successful - I could definitely get more work done again but one thing was still odd: I was clicking a lot to enable and disable everything. What do you do as a lazy developer? Yes - you automate.

Alfred to the Rescue

Some of you may already be familiar with Alfred App - the handy and powerful brother of Spotlight. I have been using it for quite a while now so the decision was easy to create my own workflow for Alfred.

So, that is what happened and here's how it looks:

Using focus 20 I can now start my focus time of 20 minutes, automatically have notifications disabled, Slack status set, and all reverted after the time is up. While it is active I can of course stop it manually by using focus again or just see the remaining time:

I published this one alongside with another one to easily create screen captures and store them as GIFs - as used in this post.

Check them out here: https://github.com/rose-m/alflows and let me know what you think!