Stevea Robbins here.

Welcome to the Get It Done guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Today's topic is how to focus at your computer.

The quick and dirty tip is to plan ahead and don't multitask.

I've received several listener questions about how to stay focused at your computer,

Harold, Heather, Devin, Corrigan, and Alejandra, to name a few.

Harold put it best.

I have a staggering amount of work that needs to be done at my computer.

I often find myself with a few minutes to spare, and I gravitate toward my computer,

since I have so much work to do there.

But then I sit down,

check my email, check a few websites that I check regularly. And then before I get any real work done,

I'm out of time. Ah, Harold, the computer is the most complex device ever made. Isn't that impressive? It's a camera. No, it's a stereo. No, it's a game. No, it's a typewriter, a calculator, a newspaper, a TV. It's, my friend, we talk, we play together. I don't need anyone else in the whole wide world. And that is precisely the problem. The computer comes chock full of its very own distractions, and it entices us to lose

the separation between work and play. It's a giant mashup of everything, kind of like all-in-one

baby food for adults. Separation decreased distraction. When tools were separate, we had to move from task to task physically.

Listeners under 25 won't believe this, but it's true. To type a paper, we pulled our chair over to a thing called a typewriter.

When we typed a wrong letter, we went to the supply desk, got out a little bottle of white paint called

correction fluid, and deleted the letter by painting over it by hand. Then we'd blow on it

and wait for it to dry. Spell check was handled by a dictionary, a book made out of paper,

which sat five feet away on our bookshelf. To talk to a friend, we didn't

have cell phones. We had telephones, and they were connected to the wall by a wire. We had to move to

the telephone and talk there. We sent messages by mail, no e, and paid 39 cents apiece to send them. They would

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