Optimizing Your Bookmark Bar for Distraction-Free Work

When I sit down to work on an item on my to-do list, I often have a myriad of things that come up while browsing through my tasks that hook me and get me distracted. Most of the time these are other work-related tasks.

But there were other times when something completely tangential would come up that would take my full attention!

These habits are often made worse by working from home where there’s less of a workspace mindset created (in addition to no one around peeking at your screen!). A lot of the drive to deliver tasks and clean up our to-do lists in such scenarios come from looming timelines or our accountability to other people.

The design of products these days increasingly encourage distraction in the name of ‘keeping you informed’.

Red notification dots, homepage feeds, e-mail, app, text notifications, etc. often distract us and funnel our attention down an alternate path. There’s an increasing need to introduce a design paradigm in web navigation that encourages more focused work.

The very first set of applications that would need to adopt such a paradigm are modern-day web browsers. Browsing on Chrome or Safari is like walking in an attention minefield. Many of their features are designed to get you distracted.

One such feature is browser tabs. Tabbed browsing is an attention-sucking funnel in the disguise of a revolutionary UX enhancement. On one hand, you have the convenience of not having to browse through multiple windows to navigate the internet. On the other hand, you are given the illusion that some piece of work you previously started is sitting there in a corner of your screen waiting for you to come back to it.

Over the years, I’ve tried many solutions to not get distracted while doing work on my browser. This includes tricks like blocking time on my calendar, page-blocking Chrome plug-ins, the Pomodoro technique, etc. and none of them gave me great results. I always found a way to funnel my attention into something else.

However, in the last 4 months, I learned a simple trick on my web browser that helped alleviate some of these problems, i.e. leveraging the bookmarks bar better!

The trick is to simply set up your bookmarks bar with the end-page of your most frequently conducted activities. By end-page, I simply mean the webpage URL on which the final activity is done.

For example, I’m a technical product manager who spends a great deal of time —

• On my JIRA board, writing and prioritizing different features
• On the project repo, reviewing SQL queries committed by developers
• On other dashboards, monitoring updates, sign-offs, and open issues

I also have a few tasks that span only a few days or weeks like writing a Product Requirements Document on Google Docs or reviewing slides for a presentation at a conference. Combining the perpetual bookmarks with the ad-hoc ones, I organize my bookmarks bar to something like the one below, revisiting them every Monday morning to ensure the ones on there are still relevant.

It’s important to ensure that your bar is limited to one row and does not span multiple rows. Not only does it reduce your viewing area, but it also increases your surface area for getting distracted. I also try to avoid set ups like these —

The reasons being —

• Bookmarks organized into multiple folders impedes quick access and also requires more cognition.
• Links that direct you to your Facebook or LinkedIn simply make you navigate to them more often.
• Naming your bookmarks with vague inferences again introduces cognition prior to navigation.

Hope you found this article useful. Happy distraction-free browsing!

Cheers.

*goes back to doom scrolling on Twitter*