If you want to be productive, there’s one simple thing you can do:

Disable all notifications right now.

Notifications can be really distracting and break your workflow. And while you might be thinking that’s not the case, just try it for a day or two and you’ll realise.

Unless you are in a job where listening to each and every notification is very important, drop them off.

But that will mean that you won’t be getting to know when you get a mail or tweet. Here’s a good balance, turn off the ringing/vibrating for push notifications but allow apps to display a badge for notifications (iOS).

Here’s how to do this:

  1. Go to Settings [arr] Notifications.
  2. Select the app.
  3. Turn Notification Center off.
  4. Set alert style to “None”.
  5. Turn everything off except “Badge App Icon”.

This will ensure that your phone never interrupts you. However, you can take a look for anything new when you’re free.

I’ve been doing this for a week now and it greatly increases the productivity.