Andy Brett

Maintaining focus while working independently can be a daunting task. I’m slowly but surely ramping up my ability to be fully disciplined and focused on one thing at a time, for extended periods of time.

This advice from Caterina Fake has been invaluable. I have been unlearning the habit of constantly checking my email, and it’s probably the one thing that’s had the single greatest impact on my ability to focus. If you look closely you’ll notice that while you’re only checking email once every three hours during the day, you should “send anytime.” This is key - but how can you do that?

Like most people I know, I use the web client for Gmail, so in order to send an email you have to go to Gmail and at the very least you get a brief glimpse of your inbox. For me, that brief glimpse is enough to start consuming brain cycles. There are a number of Chrome extensions and little helper programs that supposedly let you send without seeing your inbox, but I’ve found the easiest thing is to just bookmark this link:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs;=1&tf;=1

Easy enough. Hopefully this saves someone some time.