For most professionals, work emails, project management apps, and messaging apps are realities of life they can’t do without.

But you can move them a bit away from you to stay clear of the downsides.

As a starting point remove all of these apps from your phone. Email, Slack, Asana, Basecamp, Teams, or the likes.

Instead of looking at them as different apps, look at them as inboxes that you clear once or twice a day. It brings the benefits of batching obviously and allows you to tackle all incoming messages at one go.

You will only notice how much attention passive checking of tasks is pulling once you stop doing it.

The bigger benefit is that instead of passively checking your messages across the apps through the day, you can just tackle them all at once.

And, rest of the time, you can work on your tasks at hand, without worrying about inbound.

This way you’ll be able to do more in less time and stay relaxed and focused throughout the day.