I don’t want to be productive for productivity sake. It’s not about cranking more widgets. I search for productivity because I have better days when I get to focus on hard tasks. The result of focus is that I end up getting more done.

So here are 3 changes I made recently to help me be more focused that I’ll carry into 2026.

Track your Interruptions

I’ve been feeling super distracted since September and I’m tired of fighting to get work done every day. I miss the days where I get to focus on things and just write code or words without distractions. So when I came across the idea to track your interruptions it felt like a bit of a revelation.

Knowing what is pulling my focus away from the tasks I want to be doing means I can take action to get back to a place where I get to experience flow in my work. When I experience flow, I also enjoy work.

Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been tracking my distractions and came to some realizations.

The biggest problem was me. I’d choose to look at Reddit for something randomly interesting. I’d choose to check out Facebook marketplace to see if there was a good stereo deal. I’d troll Mastodon just to see if someone had replied to me or if there was a cool link I should add to my read later list. With that knowledge I manually blocked some sites from my main work machine. Now Facebook, Reddit and Mastodon are black holed by editing my /etcs/hosts file and return nothing. It took a week to stop myself from typing in the URL.

The second most frustrating thing is the bane of many corporate workers…fucking Slack. I even have it good with only one coworker, but still a few messages a day highlighting some Github task they’d like me to deal with now/next/first derails good deep programming work. To combat this I just don’t open Slack until after lunch daily. Yes I did inform my coworker/boss and if something important comes up he will send me a text message, but even then we’ve had to talk a few times about what is important and what can wait.

Finally, household stuff. I’ve had to get a bit stricter again with my wife about what I can and can’t help with around the house in the middle of work. In fact just a few minutes ago she got a text message about her phone plan and wondered if it was a better deal than her current one. She came to ask me and I had to remind her that I wouldn’t come on the ice (she’s a figure skating coach) to ask this question and she needs to let me work. Ask at lunch when I’m not on work.

Getting stricter again about my interruptions, after realizing what they were by tracking them has helped huge in the last few weeks. I’m shipping more features and most importantly feeling better about my work. Focus time is a big deal if you want to feel productive.

How do I track my interruptions? I just write them down in the notebook that sits at my desk. You don’t need some fancy formal way to track them and get reports, just write it down and review it at the end of the week.

Emacs org-mode and no real sync

Early in 2025 I started using Emacs and org-mode to deal with all my tasks, and even my read later lists. I had loved nvim orgmode but always found that it had little issues. Headings wouldn’t work quite right, links wouldn’t format sometimes. Overall, it was clearly a clone of the real org-mode and it showed.

Emacs org-mode via Doom with evil mode came to my rescue. Familiar vim keybindings and all the power of Emacs as a lisp interpreter. I’ve been able to setup org-pomodoro directly on my tasks and easily built some custom views to sort tasks for meetings[^1].

The biggest revelation has been not syncing my tasks to my phone. Yes I use Syncthing to backup my data, and yes that does sync to my phone via Mobius which lets beorg view my tasks, but I never look at them. There is just enough jank in beorg and syncthing that sometimes a file gets corrupt and I have to start dealing with conflicts.

So the revelation in the later part of 2025 was that, I should just ignore my tasks on the go. If I have something I need to remember I pull out my pocket notebook and write it down. This forces me to think through whatever needs to get done and plan it out instead of flipping through random tasks on the fly. I’ve found that an extra 2 minutes of preparation saves me time and most importantly headaches.

Pomodoro

I’ve used the pomodoro system at times but with Emacs being my task manager of choice I’ve now added org-pomodoro. Deciding what I’m doing then focusing for 25 minutes has been great. Just the reminder that I have a timer going means when I feel bored for a second while I wait for a server to reboot, or a build to happen before deployment means I am far more likely to catch myself looking for distraction. Then I sit and wait instead of looking for something to take my mind off a bit of boredom.

Since I just wait, I don’t get drawn into random internet holes that end up stealing tens of minutes of focus while I wait for a task that takes at the longest a few minutes.

With these changes, a few coming at the end of 2025 I’m looking forward to having a 2026 where I feel better about the work I’m getting done, and hopefully get to dig in deeper to the things that matter.

[^1]: Video coming on that one