This post is part of a series called “The Pillars of Personal Growth.” You can read the other post in these respective links Awareness and Routine. In this post, I share how you can maximize your attention.
I often find myself in these situations.
- I’m busy fixing a critical defect in my product at work and my colleague pings me on skype to ask about the design documents.
- I open an article to read in the browser. Before I know, there are 10 other tabs open. I don’t even know which one I was originally on.
- Checking twitter feed or texting while driving.
It’s not just me. The new communication technologies have improved our lives in ways we could not have imagined. We can now connect with anyone anywhere in the world at any time of the day. But at the cost of our attention. The devices we hold in our hands have given others the ability to take our time away with a push of a button. The constant dings and dangs have minimized our attention span to mere a couple of seconds.
Focus is the ability to pay attention to ONE thing at the expense of all others. This can be difficult in a society that emphasizes multitasking. We take pride in juggling tasks, though achieved nothing productive at the end of the day. How can we focus better on this highly distractible world? In this post, I will share the tactics I applied to improve my focus and maximize my attention span.
Charlie Munger once said, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” He says “Many problems can’t be solved forward. They can be best solved by thinking backward.” Focus is one such problem we have to solve by thinking backwards. We need to eliminate both our mental and physical distraction to be able to focus on the ONE task at hand.
Clear your mental distractions
Our mind is either occupied with the memories and regrets of the past or planning and dreaming about the future. We are hardly ever in the present moment. We think about what our next action will be. We think about past conversations. We worry about the future. And many other thoughts go through our minds all the time. With so much going inside our minds, it is hard to focus on the task at hand. It is important to clear our minds often and empty our thoughts so that we can focus on what is in front of us. Here are a few ways how I clear my mind.
Journaling
Writing a journal is an underrated tool for clearing your mind. It is as good as meditation. Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way explains a concept called Morning Pages for journaling. You sit down every morning and write anything and everything that comes to your mind. Your mood, reflection, plan. She recommends the following guidelines for writing morning pages.
- Three pages of longhand writing done in the morning.
- It is a clearing exercise where you go poking into all the corners of your consciousness.
- Write down any cloud thoughts that just move through your consciousness.
- It is an exercise that makes you have much more consciousness as you pass through your day
Task Manager
We all had moments when we knew we forgot something and tried to recall what it is. The watercolor your son wanted to buy. To pay the bill that was due last week. The call you were supposed to make your friend after reaching home. The meeting you were going to set up with the insurance agent. Trying to remember these trivial tasks takes too much of our attention and working memory.
Our mind should be free of such thoughts to be able to focus on important things. A task manager can record, remember, and keep track for us. Record anything that has your attention. It could be your todos, grocery shopping list, follow-ups, and the bucket list items.
I have tried many task management systems. The one that worked for is Getting Things Done(GTD) introduced by David Alan. GTD helps you keep track of the tasks, from the time it has your attention to its completion. It’s a todo list on steroids. GTD is a five-step process where you capture, process, organize, and engage with the task.
The above image from hive.com summarizes the five steps of the GTD system
It is an elaborate process to set up. But the rewards are greater than the time spent. You can learn more about Getting Things Done in this post.
Other Activities
Meditate – Meditation is a popular technique for relaxation and stress relief that can significantly increase your ability to concentrate and focus. Meditation helps us train our brains to catch when we are distracted.
Get enough sleep – Sleep itself has a role in the consolidation of memory, which is essential to work and learn. If you are sleep-deprived, you cannot focus your attention optimally and therefore cannot work efficiently. The days I get less than enough sleep are the least productive days. I can manage a day with 7 hours of sleep, but my mind and body are energized when I have 8 hours of sleep.
Step back – When we step back and take a pause from work, we may be able to connect dots and solve the problems we would not have otherwise.
Walking is a great way to move your body and let your mind make its connection to come up with ideas and to solve problems. Listen to music. Exercise. Do any activity that you enjoy and keep you away from work. It will help you clear your mind and lets you focus better when you get back to work.
Clear the physical distractions
Phone and email are the two killers of productivity and focus. It takes our time away from the present by giving us dopamine shots in the form of notifications. It is important to set up our devices and tools to work for us, not distract us. Below are a few ways I reduce the physical distractions.
Screen time
Limiting my phone usage has paid me huge dividends. We are addicted to dopamine provided by short messages and apps on our phones. Unless we make a conscious choice and limit our screen time, phones and social media apps are going to consume our time from work and family.
Limiting your screen time is a skill that can be learned. It will not be easy like any other skill initially is. You will have to practice and practice to get better. Since I made the following adjustments, I have gone from more than 4 hours of screen time to less than 2 hours of screen time. If you have a few hours to spare, I would highly recommend you go through this great article on how to set up your phone for productivity.
- Turn off the damn notifications. As soon as we see the dang on the phone, our mind turns our attention away from what we were doing. It may take up to 25 minutes for us to get back to what we were doing. If you have 10 such instances in a day, your day is gone in unproductive stuff.
- Do not carry the phone in your pocket. Like you, I had my phone with me all the time. In the bed, to the restroom, while driving, in the middle of a conversation. As soon as I stopped carrying the phone with me, my quality of sleep has gone up and I am sleeping longer. It has made me stick to my morning routine. I am listening to my kids when they talk. It has increased my attention overall.
- Delay the screen time as long as possible – Most of us wake up to our phones. We scroll through social media apps endlessly. I was no exception to this habit. I tried skipping my phone until as long as possible. I started with a goal of 9 AM. Now I don’t pick up my phone until noon.
Do not multitask
We think we can efficiently multitask. Actually we do not multitask, we just juggle between tasks. The cost of getting back to a task is very high. According to this article by Blake Thorne, it takes up to 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the original task after a distraction. Here are some ways to avoid multitasking
- Close all the applications open on your computer. Open only the application you are about to work on.
- Do not keep more than a few tabs open in the browser.
- Collect all the articles in an app like Pocket or Instapaper so that you do not have to keep the browser tabs open.
- Restart your computer daily. You may lose a few minutes, but you will save a lot of time by keeping only a few applications open every morning.
Batch things
Most of us check emails and social media accounts multiple times a day. I am guilty of it too. I used to open my stock trading account more than 10 times a day. These trivial tasks should be batched for once or twice a day. Some say their work demands an immediate response to emails. Most of the emails we get can wait for a few hours. If it was urgent, they would have called you. The following are some of the tasks that can be batched.
- Social media
- Stock prices
- Meal prep
- Community messages(Slack, Reddit, message boards)
Clearing distractions and focusing will help with getting the job done. But how do we know what we are working on is important and worth our effort and attention?
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”
Steve Jobs
How can we say no to 1000 things so that we can focus on the one thing that is worth our time and energy? In my next post, I will share ideas to say no more often and prioritize what’s important.
This post is part of a series “The Pillars of Personal Growth.” You can read about Awareness and Routine in the respective links.