Staying productive can be challenging for those who are navigating through ambiguity.

Here are ways to push back against distractions.

Product Managers (PMs) sit at the core of their product teams, directing traffic and ensuring business success. They work to unblock engineers, work with designers on conceptualization, strategize on roadmaps, prioritize, and track product success through analytics and other ways.

The variance in their work ranges from tropical biomes to the harshest snowy winters. In non-metaphorical terms — I’m saying they do lots of different work and wear many hats.

This leads to a whole new problem: PMs get lost in the weeds too easily thanks to the chaos around them. To-do lists grow to staggering levels. Email inboxes become crowded, and ideas are always coming and going. Context-switching, one of the biggest challenges for a PM due to the array of work needed — can disrupt states of flow in concentration.

So how does this affect productivity? Well, when a PM works in an ambitious product team, the environment will naturally turn chaotic. Ideas will come flowing in from different sources, meetings will pop-up on-the-go, and work items will run into blockers or directional changes.

Many variables will challenge your behavior and work style.

You’ll find yourself distracted with spontaneous emails, messages, and maybe even calls throughout the day. These situations can easily disrupt your focus on deep work.

Here are some ways to push back against this distracting environment:

​1. Stay committed to your “focus hours.”

​Many calendar tools these days allow us to block out intentional time for focusing — whether it’d be catching up on emails, deep analytical work, drafting new ideas, or anything in-between.

​Yet, I either don’t see enough people utilize them, or they faze out of value due to distractions or poor habits.

​I won’t even deny it — I’m still a victim of this myself: I’ll block out a part of my afternoon and put my status to “do not disturb” so I can focus on some project brainstorming. Then, yippie! I unconsciously open up emails and Slack messages out of stress, fearing my unavailability to respond at timely matters will ruin my reputation among coworkers or delay a product defect from reaching its fix.

​I’ve learned to really fight that urge and plan out my focus hours smartly. I strive to understand the hours of my day which are “safer” from bombardments of emails, or try to provide status messages to coworkers. For me, since half my team works in CST, I tend to find the hours of 3-5 pm PST to offer me more room for focus. Thus, you'll see me blocking time out for myself to catch up on emails, writing epics, fixing the roadmap, or writing documentation.

​But of course, not everyday is full of rainbows. We all have those days of unproductiveness or the "afternoon slump" hitting us like a train at full speed. It happens, and it's key to work on our minds to be ready for it - which brings me to my next suggestion.

​2. Fix up your online and offline environment to set yourself up for success.

​Some probably get this, while others may be thinking, what does he even mean?

​We all look down at our phones every x periods of time. They're "mini slot machines" that have been socially engineered to extract every ounce of attention that you can provide to it on a given day. You then begin building dopamine receptors that rely on these social app-cravings. Think about it: social media featuring tailored ads that offer you nail polish ("when the heck did Instagram catch me shopping for that?!"), funny memes that cause you to doom-scroll until the end of time, or simply interesting Reddit threads on topics that you're interested in (How did Reddit know I would like r/interestingasf*ck?). All these social platforms demand our attention because they're ad-dependent, and we lose some hours of productivity during the day because of it. After all, we live in an attention economy, and our abilities as PMs to achieve "a state of flow" in focus has never been harder. So now that I've set the pre-text for this second topic, I'd like to offer some tips and tricks to ensure your environment sets you up for success (to be productive!):

• ​Turn your phone on airplane mode and put it in another room. If I'm in the office, it's usually tucked into my backpack, because "out of sight, out of mind." If your phone is within view, of course your brain is craving that small dopamine rush, and you'll want to reach for it.
• ​Block certain websites you can access in your browser, such as Facebook or Twitter. You can do this with various web extensions.
• ​Write your daily "to-dos" in your notebook and keep that notebook in front of you, within view. It reminds your brain about the work you must finish for the day.
• ​If you don't want your devices physically away, at least turn off notifications.
• ​It also helps sometimes if you move to a meeting room or a “focus room” and put on noise-canceling headphones.

​As a reminder - I'm not telling you to stop using social media. It's super important that we keep connected online nowadays - for friends, connections, events, personal branding, and so forth. But we need to ensure that we're using our digital devices intentionally and with deep purpose, rather than subconsciously doom-scrolling low-value content. My point being: there's a difference between needing to do work during your 9-5 but finding yourself browsing memes on your phone, as opposed to intentionally browsing memes during a period of self-chosen leisure. Keep that balance!

3. Write down the siloes of your work and plan each one within your calendar accordingly.

Siloes are different areas of your work which would require “context-switching.” For example, at Microsoft, I work on both customer-facing features in our Search experience, such as reviewing negative feedback.

On the other side, I also work on backend products which help other feature teams out, which require more technical discussions.

To plan out enough space in my calendar for focused work, I’ll dedicate certain parts of the day (or week) to a certain silo, before jumping over to the other. This prevents spontaneous context-switching, therefore making it easier for me to focus on one area at a time.

4. Communicate these needs with your manager ASAP, and brainstorm together on how to improve your focus levels.

This can be a hard odd topic to bring up. After all, it’s our responsibility as employees to navigate our own environments to get the job done.

So how do you do it without looking like you require more overhead?

Instead of asking for advice directly, I’d rather take a “explain your journey” approach. The best advice comes from learning about the experiences of others, and the step-by-step process on how they got from A to B.

It’s easier than people think. It’s a matter of perspective. I start with, “I think as PMs sometimes we’ll run into pretty chaotic environments, where we get distracted from emails, messages, and other spontaneous events. Do you have any experience with trying to buy time for yourself to minimize distractions and get focused work done?”

PMs are poised to ask high-quality questions, so ask smartly with intentions on growth and productivity.

5. Adopt a “digital minimalism” outlook.

Turn phone and desktop notifications off. Learn to check emails and messages more “intentionally” rather than “sporadically.” Stop browsing social media during the day, unless it’s truly for work purposes.

Digital minimalism just means only using digital devices for productivity. In a world of social media, emails, and other attention-grabbing applications, focusing on work has never been harder.

Let’s take Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism book, for example. In the book, he suggests that distracting yourself with emails and notifications ruins your concentration for actual deep work. This, combined with access your phone for social media, consuming mundane content, and other activities, makes for a distracting work environment. Your brain may find it hard to achieve deeper levels of thinking, or a “state of flow.”

But the issue here is that PMs have it incredibly tough; emails and messages have to be answered promptly, work is always changing based on business needs, and live site issues can happen at any time.

That’s why focus time is harder to come by, but not impossible to find. Follow these tips explained above, and you’ll adapt faster than you know.

Thank you for reading! Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter and follow me on Medium for more content!