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Learn to recognize when you are bored at work so that you know to increase the difficulty of your work to re-enter your flow channel.

Everybody will have their own tells-Oz knows this is happening if he sighs before speaking to a colleague (a sign that he's been intermittently holding his breath while working on a tough problem) or if he finds himself sitting on the edge of his bed in the morning, for an extended period of time, with only one sock on, thinking about the day ahead.

Learn to recognize when your work is making you anxious so that you know to improve your skills to re-enter your flow channel.

Lie about what you listen to at work, if you have to.

Remember, you want to pick the music (or sounds) that will make you work more effectively, not what will impress your peers or help you attract a mate. If dubstep isn't doing it for you, try drum and bass, breakbeats or Brownian noise. Listen to dubstep, a genre of electronic dance music invented to help programmers work faster (also works for the general population).Detailed esoteric rituals are best, because then you feel like an idiot if you go through the motions but fail to actually start working. You can light incense and strike a Himalayan singing bowl if that's what works for you-as long as it involves some sort of evocative stimulus to signal to your subconscious that it's time to focus. Oz will close all applications, sit as upright as possible in his chair, take a deep breath and crank up the dubstep. For Ash, this is making some tea, getting a glass of water, opening all apps that he needs for the task, closing all others, queuing an hour-long mix from one of his favorite DJs on SoundCloud then putting on his headphones. Have a 'starting work' ritual-a sequence of things that you do before starting work that you will then always associate with work.

The ideal state is one where you are so focussed that a tap on the shoulder would freak you out. You are sitting down to complete an important task, not to be ready to respond to stimulus. Wear headphones, or furrow your eyebrows in such a way as to suggest that Bad Things Will Happen if you are interrupted. Switch your phone to silent, or better yet turn it off and put it out of reach. If you are on your machine, close all chat applications, disable growl notifications and other notifications, and block yourself out of Gmail. Worried that your partner is being unfaithful, or that the mole on your arm may be cancerous, or that the Soviet Union is building missile bases in Cuba? Set a Remember The Milk task to stress out about it from 7pm to 8pm next Thursday, and get back to work. Surprisingly, this works no matter how substantial the emotion/stressor. If you can't, then there's no harm in scheduling a later time to worry about it. If you can deal with it now then deal with it now. If this sounds hard, just internalize the following truism: either you can deal with the matter right now, or you can't. Avoid starting work with a nagging emotion or stressful distraction on your mind.

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Bad posture prevents full breaths and thus oxygenation of your blood, straining eyes are tired eyes, and hot air means energy expended on cooling down. Manage your posture, light sources and airflow.Do this whenever you complete a task, and before long you will find a great deal of satisfaction in hitting ⌘Q. Create a ritual of closing unused apps and Chrome tabs, saving and filing away notes, and deleting temporary files from your desktop. The same applies to clearing your desktop.Think of yourself as a chef-before you start the next dish you need to put away the utensils you aren't using and wipe the bench, otherwise you could hurt yourself or contaminate someone's food.

Don't allow yourself the distraction that comes from clutter or personal effects every little item, even a pen, has the ability to distract.

Clear everything off your desk at the start and end of every day.

Treat your desk as a sacred work space so that next time you sit down, you subconsciously know why you're there and what you need to do. Don't watch YouTube or make personal phone calls at your desk. If somebody speaks to or waves at you, you can get away with outright ignoring them. Wear them all the time, even if you have the music off, as a sign that you are not to be disturbed.

Buy the most comfortable pair of over-ear headphones you can find.

All have worked for one or both of us, but your mileage may vary. So, here are the first hundred that came to mind. We gave him a few tips but mentioned that there are “hundreds of other things” he could do. 100 ways to get more done Ozan Onay and Ash Fontana - Ī friend recently asked us what he could do to reduce procrastination and be more effective.