You are sitting at your desk and are ready to finally finish the job. “Well, let's do it,” you think. You go to Word (or Excel, or Office, etc.) and open a new document. Do you have an idea of what needs to be done, but what will happen next? You write down a few words, but you cannot concentrate. Then you go to Facebook, 20 minutes have passed. Then comes Youtube, 60 minutes have passed. Before you understand that the time has come for lunch, half a day - as it were. Does this sound familiar? Have you ever lost your day?
But before moving on to tips, here are a few important points you need to know.
Avoiding distraction is difficult. You are not alone when it comes to distractions. It’s not easy to stay on a mission when you need to work for hours, but some people can. The question is, why are they, not you?
You have never been taught to focus. It's funny that for all our school years we have never been taught how to be focused, although this is the very first thing you needed to know.
Tools that help you master your ability to focus are useful when you need to find ways to master your focusing abilities. And you can use for this a few tips below.
1. Remember your vision and goals
First, let's figure out why do you need to focus at all? Want to become an experienced guitar player? Do you want to write a novel? Want to start working from home?
Think about it. Knowing why we should stay focused can help us get through the difficult and tedious parts of achieving any, even the most incredibly complex goals. It is your ability to focus that will really help when it is most needed.
2. Reduce chaos in business by focusing on 2-3 important tasks
If you have 20 tasks that you need to complete every day, how effective do you think your concentration abilities will be? You must break down all matters in order of priority and importance.
Focus on doing 2-3 important tasks per day (even one is normal), but nothing more. This is all you need to take steps to achieve your goals. Slower work is much better than giving up earlier because you took too much to do on the day. Another classic of Marxism-Leninism said: “Better is less is better!”
3. Complete the tasks as soon as possible
To make sure that you complete these 2-3 tasks, you must prepare for them in advance.
This means that as soon as you wake up, you are already thinking how to do it. So get up, take a shower, have breakfast and get started (yes, before work is the best time for this).
It is difficult, but expectation only accompanies distraction. Such moments will drain your willpower. This complicates the work on doing things, so do not wait - do it as soon as possible.
4. Focus only on the smallest part of your work at a time
An easy way to kill your attention is to see the goal for gigantic achievement. Most goals will require at least a few weeks to months.
As a result, you get one of two situations:
- you are disappointed because the goal is too great;
- you fantasize about how it feels to achieve a goal.
In any case, this is bad and always presents a potential problem when focusing on the overall picture or using visualization.
So what do you need to do? Instead of fantasies, focus on doing a very small, albeit minimal, amount of work.
For example, that seems simpler:
- Writing 200 words a day, or at least 2 sentences a day?
- 20 push-ups per day or at least 1 push-ups per day?
The key here is the use of lows. Over time, your minimum will increase, and you will gradually improve your ability to focus on larger tasks.
5. Visualize the workflow.
Visualization techniques can do you more harm than help. But there is the right way to use visualization, and that visualization of yourself is actually working (not as if you had already achieved success).
Running champions use this technique with great effect, usually working backwards. They imagine that they first win and then play the whole process in the reverse order, feeling and visualizing each step right up to the very beginning. A faster and more relevant way to apply such a scheme is to imagine that you are performing a small part of the task.
For example, if you need to practice playing the guitar, what should you do?
First, imagine that you are standing (really, think about how you get up, and then do it). If you truly imagine it, visualize and feel worthwhile, then acting in accordance with that feeling will be easy.
Then repeat the visualization process with each step, until you have this guitar in your hands, and you already begin to play it. The process of focusing attention at each step distracts you from how much you do not want to do something, and visualizations “prepare your body” for each necessary step.
All you have to do is apply the process to what you need to focus on - just start with the smallest movement you need to do.
6. Control your inner distractions
Internal distractions are one of those problems that you cannot escape from. You need to find ways to prepare your mind for work and find simple ways so that it does not deviate from irrelevant thoughts.
A good way to prepare your mind for work is to have a special “workstation”. If you always work in a certain area, then your mind will connect this area with thoughts related to work.
Simple enough, right? When you take breaks, do not forget to leave your workstation, and then you will find out when you are “allowed” so that your thoughts are also freely distracted from work.
Instead of focusing on what's going on inside, focus on doing something (whatever!). As soon as you do this, you will see that all your thoughts will again be associated with the completion of the task.
7. Remove external distractions (extraneous irritants)
This tip is simple, just step away from things that distract you. Is television a distraction? Work in another room. Are children distracting? Get up earlier and work until they wake up. Is the Internet distracting? Turn off the modem or router.
It’s usually obvious what you should do, but you should not lose sight of this advice anyway.
8. Skip what you do not know
This is advice that is often ignored. If you encounter work difficulties, just come back to it later. Focus on what you can do, keep working “mindlessly” at all costs. All of this means that you must first focus on the easy details.
In the end, you can return to more complex details when you get enough momentum so that it doesn't break focus.
9. Improve your discipline with focus practice
There are several focus exercises that you can do to improve your overall discipline.
The first is meditation, which is basically a definition of focus in practice. Think about it - you just sit and do nothing. This is a great method to increase your ability to concentrate, relieve stress and gain more control over your emotions.
The second exercise is the Pomodoro method. These are basically “focal sprints,” followed by a solid break. As with real sprints, over time you will perform them better and better. Each interval increases the ability to stay focused when it is important, so you should spend time on it.
10. Control your momentum
Momentum helps facilitate the achievement of goals. That is why it is important that you never make real breaks with your goals; ultimately you lose momentum and rely on discipline to get back on track.
This means that every day you need something meaningful to achieve our goals (yes, even on weekends and holidays). And when it says “meaningful,” you don’t necessarily mean a big task, but rather any task that brings you closer to your goal.
For example, if your goal is to become a freelance writer, then write quite a bit on the weekend. If your goal is to recover, then take a short 5-minute walk, even on Christmas Day.
Nothing supernatural, nothing crazy - just what is most important to achieve the goal.