Starve Your Distraction
How to Starve Your Distractions and Feed Your Focus
Do you struggle to concentrate and stay focused at work?
Perhaps you find yourself jumping between work tasks and checking your social media feeds.
And how about during your social life? Do you find it hard to stay focused during long conversations with friends or family members?
If you suffer from these issues, then don't beat yourself up about it, as most people also struggle with these things. However, if you want to get things done and achieve your goals, then you'll need to learn how to overcome distractions and become a focus master.
Fortunately, if you want to make this change — you've come to the right place!
In this article, I'll show you some of the steps to take to defeat the distractions in your life. I'll also share with you a worksheet that will help you find the focus you need to boost your efficiency and supercharge your productivity.
Let's dive straight in…
Starve Your Distractions and Feed Your Focus
The first concept I'd like to share with you is that of 'starving your distractions and feeding your focus'.
To understand this concept, you just need to be aware that your energy goes where your focus goes. And of course, your time also goes where your focus goes.
If distractions are continually stealing your time and energy, then you need to begin moving this time and energy to thoughts and actions that support your goals and dreams.
For instance, instead of aimlessly surfing the web for 20 minutes each morning before you start work, use this time to plan your day. Not only will this put you in the right mindset for a productive day, but it will also allow you to prioritize your tasks so that you guarantee that your important stuff (like writing a project document) gets completed on or ahead of time.
When you starve your distractions of your time and energy, you naturally begin to feed your focus. And with increased focus, comes increased productivity and success.
What Is Distracting You?
There are actually two types of distractions that could be negatively impacting on your life:
- External distractions
- Internal distractions
You're probably familiar with external distractions. These are things such as cell phone calls/texts, colleagues interrupting you, and breaking news alerts.
While external distractions may only last for a few seconds or minutes, they are often enough to cost you several hours of productivity a day. For example, a University of California Irvine study found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to a task after being interrupted by a single distraction.
If you're serious about achieving your goals, then you'll need to knock external distractions on their head.
And it's the same for internal distractions.
These distractions are your own thoughts and emotions.
For example, while creating a PowerPoint presentation, you might find yourself drifting off and thinking about your favorite sports team or the latest Netflix movie on your watchlist.
In terms of emotions, if you're suffering from stress or depression, you'll almost certainly find it hard to keep your energy and thoughts on the task at hand.
Now consider the dual impact of external and internal distractions: It can be catastrophic to your ability to get things done in a timely and efficient manner.
Fortunately, where there's a problem — there's a solution!
How to End Distraction and Find Focus
Getting on top of distractions and finding your focus is such an important topic, that I recently created a comprehensive online course on how to develop laser focus at the Lifehack Academy. In the course, I state that when you say goodbye to distractions and hello to focus you can gain yourself about 1,095 additional hours a year. That's equivalent to 137 working days!
Just imagine what you could do with that extra time.
For example, it would be enough time for you to learn a new language or even to start your own business.
While I don't have the space here to share all of the course's content, I do want to introduce you to a couple of key steps that will begin to crush your distractions and build your focus.
While these two steps are only part of the solution (I'll share a link to the full solution shortly), they will go a long way in helping to prevent you from wasting your days.
Step 1: Eliminate Your Options
As I mentioned above, distractions can come in external and internal forms. However, both of these distractions can be tackled with similar techniques.
The first of these techniques is to narrow down or eliminate your options.
Let me give you an example of this in action:
You're in the office and have lots of 'not so exciting' administration work to get through. Because the work is dull and laborious, you keep reaching for your cellphone to check your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds.
For most people, checking their social media feeds will always be more interesting than doing administration work — but while at work, you really should be working!
And here's the kicker:
By constantly interrupting your work, you'll just make it take longer. With uninteresting work, It's much better to focus and get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
If your distraction is checking your social media feeds on your phone, then the solution is to lock your phone and place it out of reach. Better still, turn it off until you finish the work you need to do.
This is what I mean by narrowing down and eliminating your options. When you have a chance to do something other than work, you'll probably take it. But when you only have your work in front of you, you'll find the focus to get it done.
Another example of this is when you want to learn a new skill such as coding or playing piano. While learning, ensure you have 100% focus by shutting off distractions from friends, family and the internet.
To help you further with this, take a few minutes now to complete the below exercise.
All you need to do is list your distractions in the left-hand column of the spreadsheet, and then jot down a few words in the right-hand column about how you can eliminate them.
This simple process will allow you to identify the options/distractions around you. This will then enable you to come up with specific actions to take to reduce or eliminate them.
Step 2: Create Mental Stop Signs
Another effective technique for overcoming distractions is to create mental stop signs.
Again, let me illustrate this in action with an example:
It's the weekend and you need to prepare some work for a meeting on Monday morning. The problem is, every time you try to focus on your work you end up surfing the web for stuff to read, stuff to watch, and stuff to eat.
And of course, the internet is like a rabbit hole. Once you go down it — it's very hard to come back up!
One page leads to another… leads to another… leads to another…
The secret to breaking this chain is to set mental stop signs.
The simplest stop sign is a time limit. For instance, you can let yourself surf the web before starting your work, but you'll set yourself a maximum time limit to do this of 5 minutes. (I suggest you set an alarm on your device to remind you when your surfing time is over.) This will ensure that you don't get caught up in a mammoth surfing session.
A slight variation of this technique is to set a progress limit.
Say you wanted to watch a few music videos on YouTube. Instead of allowing yourself to watch half a dozen videos, you would set a maximum limit of 2 or 3 videos. This would naturally stop you spending more than 10 minutes or so away from your work.
Now you understand what mental stop signs are, go ahead and spend some time filling out the form below.
To help get you started, I've already added the example I mentioned above.
There is an important 3rd step that can fully help you starve your distractions and feed your focus — you'll learn all about it in our FREE downloadable guide:
End Distraction & Find Your Focus (The Insiders Guide)
This easy-to-read guide will show you all the tricks and techniques you need to avoid distractions and to stay laser-focused.
Take Back Control of Your Life
When you starve your distractions and feed your focus, you'll free yourself from a heavy burden. And this freedom will give you the time and energy to be creative and productive. You'll be able to get things done and achieve your goals and dreams.
Focus really does separate the winners from the losers. The latter see their life drift aimlessly away; the former take control of their life and succeed in everything they turn their hand to.
I sincerely hope this article has inspired you to develop your focus and to boost your productivity. Traits that will put you into the winning camp.
If you haven't done so already, please download our FREE guide now. I'm confident that when you put its principles into action in your life it will put you on a bright and positive pathway. A pathway filled with accomplishment and personal satisfaction.
Source: https://medium.com/the-ascent/how-to-starve-your-distractions-and-feed-your-focus-66109dd75583
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