How do you stay focused in a world if distractions?

Let's all start by getting the dumbest phone that we can.

I think the answer will vary between people, depending on what distractions they're most susceptible to.

But maybe an over-arching principle is: be intentional with how you spend your time. If you actively want to spend 2 hours scrolling through Instagram: great, go ahead. If that doesn't feel worthwhile (or you're not actively choosing to do it): figure out what you'd rather be doing, and a strategy to do it. But you have to start with the intention: if you just go with the flow, it won't happen.

I know this might sound silly... but often the more distractions there are the less distracted I am.

Youtube has always been my main problem area. I search something reasonable/useful/educational and then end up with 10+ browser tabs of distractions that waste a ton of my time, mostly due to suggestions. I recently installed a browser extension to hide suggestions, but you can also do this less elegantly with ublock origin/adnauseum. Avoiding/ublocking any sort of suggested content is very helpful.

A woman I lived with needed daytime teevee in the background all the time for her to focus on homework.  It was like a background-radation level of irritation that shoved her mind away from wandering.

I use frequent interruptions.  It's fashionable to call it a "pomodoro timer," after one blogger talked about how they used a tomato-shaped cooking timer to give himself an interruption every half-hour.

• every X minutes (blogger used 30, I use 60), an alarm goes off
• stop what you're doing; stand up, look away, long enough to "lose your train of thought"
• return, pick up where you left off

I find I get stuck on side-quests and tangents, and this interruption shakes me out of it.  I'll do one short chore that has an end-condition: five basic stretches, or wash what's in the kitchen sink, sweep the floor, water the plants, etc, before I return.  If I don't remember whatever I was doing when I was interrupted, then it wasn't important.

(wait, isn't this like the intermissions during monday night anime?)  ( :3c  )