Learn a constructive distraction and distract yourself with those when needed from your work
Tags: productivity, pomodoro, tip
Published: 2023-02-24 07:11:55

I know title is little bit on the negative side, but hear me out.

![A meme, who put this, idk? lol](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/h0h8apsg8098fxsneptw.gif)

From my personal experience I have learned that having a "CONSTRUCTIVE" distraction helps you to avoid the "DESTRUCTIVE" distractions.

Constructive distractions are activities that doesn't harm you a lot in negative ways. We can say that their positive effects outweighs negative ones. For example, playing guitar, learning headstand, pull ups, art & craft, reading, puzzle solving like jigsaw, or crosswords etc or even solving a rubix cube.

Destructive distractions are social media (bad use of it makes it destructive), watching clips of your favourite shows, etc.

## Why do we need distraction at all?

![A meme, who put this, idk? lol](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1v13z8xkcfu5qanfjc6e.jpg)

If you are at working let's say 8 hours, or studying long hours, breaks are necessary. Now many use pomodoro method, like me. Some may take break when they feel like they need it. It's good, nothing wrong with breaks.

But most people say that _"breaks doesn't work for me, yesterday I took break for 5 minutes and end up scrolling some random things for about 50 minutes and realised when my wife called me angrily to remind me about picking my child from nursery which was 20 minutes ago"_. And then concludes that breaks disturbs the productivity. And that's where they are wrong.

Ideally you should take a break and do activity that actually detach you from your work for a while so that when you come back you have some of your batteries charged. And the activity we select is so crucial for our break to work on our side rather than working against us. That activity should be easy to detach once break ends.

So basically we are distracting ourselves for brief period of time to get detach from work & regain the power to focus for another session.

So we should have a constructive distraction to make our break fruitful.

## My personal view on constructive distraction

![A meme, who put this, idk? lol](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/u826nqidkv2t11e0deee.jpg)
Personally, years back I learned how to solve rubix 3 * 3 cube. Now it's not that hard once you know the set of moves and their sequences. Solving a rubix cube doesn't require intelligence, finding a way to solve rubix cube does. But there are several ways (algorithms) to solve the rubix cube nowadays and we can easily learn them by practice and memorisation.

I initially learned it for being cool, but then something happened. When I took breaks before, I instantly jump to social media to scroll away my time or maybe surf reddit. But after learning the cube, I got motivated to solve it under "X" minutes. So when break hits, I started to solve cube. Usually my breaks are 5-10 mins long. The quality of regaining the focus after break improved, because solving cube actually stopped the train of thoughts related to my work & distracted my thought train to solve the cube.

Eventually I achieve 1 minute mark in solving the cube and that's when I learned to touch type. Another distraction. Now I kept the cube aside and whenever the break hit, I started doing touch typing. I got motivated by seeing my progress and hoped to reach 100 wpm mark. And I reached. Now this was just my "break" time which I would have spent into mindless scrolling or surfing.

So choose a constructive task that best suits your nature of work. The domain of that tasks could be subjective as everyone have different minds & different work.

For someone it could be
- solving a jigsaw puzzle
- doing a headstand
- playing a music instrument
- Taking a walk (maybe with your dog [I don't have any, I am lonely lol)
- Taking a shower??
- Growing set of plants or flowers and watering them, basically caring it
- Doodling or crafts or art
- Who knows, right?

## Conclusion
If you are taking a break from your work a brief period of time, fill that break with constructive distraction. A distraction that could add positive value & at the same time could help you regain focus.

Also look for a change when mind wanders
When I started solving cube under 1 minute, my mind was able to solve with little conscious effort because that task become more of muscle memory. So my mind wandered back to my work and then eventually spent my time into thinking about work, while in background solving a cube for couple of times.

So I had to look for a change and found another distraction. And then one more, then one more and I guess process will go on until that distraction becomes too easy for me to perform.

So look for a change when you think that distraction is not working!


![A meme, who put this, idk? lol](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gyjtbzv5ekeyy4svfqfa.jpeg)

## Trigger warning
Negative distractions that I listed could be very subjects, so for someone scrolling through social media could be informative or maybe it's what they personally like, so take that thing as subjective belief of mine rather than a general conclusion.

And also goes for positive distractions too, for someone doing headstand on the first day itself could result into accident (damn, that shoulder pain I had). So also positive distractions could be subjective thing, so pardon me if I may have hUrT anyone's belief or a shoulder :)

Let me know what you think of that, or maybe you can share your own "constructive" distractions that you may have developed