GrivunHow to stop getting distracted at work
Work distraction is rarely one big thing. It is forty small ones, most of them arriving through the same three doors: notifications, chat, and the browser. Close the doors and the blocks take care of themselves.
Interruptions cost more than they last
A two-minute question is not two minutes. Gloria Mark's team at UC Irvine, observing knowledge workers in their actual jobs, found it takes around twenty-three minutes to fully return to an interrupted task, and that people often complete two other things in between. Her later measurements put the average time on any one screen at 47 seconds.
The conclusion is not that colleagues are the problem. It is that a workday without protected time is a workday made entirely of recovery.
1. Triage notifications at the source
Do this once, in the settings of each tool, and it holds for months. The test for each notification is simple: if it arrived at 10:04 instead of 11:30, would anything change? For nearly all of them, nothing would.
2. Two deep blocks on the calendar
Put them in as busy so meetings land elsewhere, and treat them like meetings: you would not answer chat during one. Morning blocks are usually the strongest. If mornings are full of standing meetings, the afternoon block becomes the important one, and the calendar should say so.
"I do two focus blocks a day, 9 to 11 and 2 to 3:30. Chat is closed then; I check it at 11 and 4. If something cannot wait, call me." One message to the team, and the blocks stop being a mystery. Most people ask how to do the same.
3. Chat and email in windows, not as a background
A chat window that is always open is a slot machine with colleagues in it. Close it during blocks, set a status with the time you are back, and open it fully in the windows: read everything, answer everything, close it again. Thirty minutes of full attention clears more than four hours of glancing.
If the team's culture expects instant replies, the fix is a conversation about response times, not a browser tab. Almost every message tolerates two hours. The ones that cannot have a phone number.
4. Close the browser doors
The browser is where most self-interruption happens, because the same window holds the work and the escape from it.
- Tabs. One window for the task. Bookmark the rest and close them; the set can come back at the end of the block.
- Work tools with feeds. LinkedIn is a work tool with a feed attached. So is X for many people, and YouTube, and Reddit. Blocking them breaks the work; leaving them breaks the block. Grivun's feed mode keeps search, messages, profiles and direct links, and removes the home feed, trends and recommendations. Free on one platform.
- Sites you want a little of. A daily budget: twenty minutes of news, then it closes until tomorrow.
- A schedule. Blocking on from nine to six, off in the evening, without deciding each time.
- The block itself. A focus session locks the sites you choose for 50 or 90 minutes; in strict mode it cannot be paused or edited until it ends. Alt+Shift+F starts one.
Feed mode and focus sessions are free. Daily budgets, schedules and the strict lock are Pro, with a seven-day trial at install.
5. Working from home
- A start and an end. A short walk before and after replaces the commute as the switch.
- One place for work, even if it is one side of the table, and nothing else happens there.
- A separate browser profile with only work bookmarks and extensions. The personal profile stays closed until the day ends.
- The phone in another room is easier at home than anywhere else. Use it.
Set it up this week
- Monday: notifications. Twenty minutes in the settings of chat, email and every tool that pings. Sort each one into answer, mute, batch or unsubscribe.
- Two blocks on the calendar for every day this week, marked busy. Send the one message to the team.
- First block: chat closed, status set, one browser window, phone elsewhere.
- Windows at 11 and 4. Everything read, everything answered, closed again.
- Friday: look at what got finished. Compare it with a normal week. Then keep the blocks.
Questions
My job is customer support or on-call. Blocks are impossible.
Then the block is shorter and the window is the job. Even support work has tasks that need twenty minutes of unbroken attention: writing the reply that will get reused, fixing the recurring issue. Protect those with a colleague covering the queue, and trade.
I work in an open-plan office and the noise is the distraction.
Headphones are the accepted signal, with or without sound. Book a room for the deep block if there is one. And the browser part still applies: most open-plan interruptions are self-inflicted.
The distraction is work itself: new tasks keep arriving.
Capture them on a list during the block and sort them afterwards. A task that arrives mid-block is almost never more urgent than the one you were doing; it is only newer.
Does Grivun block Slack or Teams?
It can block the web versions during a session if you add them, but that is rarely the point. The point is closing the feeds and the escape hatches so the chat window can be closed on purpose, in a window, by you.
Try it on the site that costs you the most
Grivun is free for up to three sites and feed mode on one platform, with seven days of full Pro to start. No account, and nothing leaves your browser.
Add to Chrome — free