In this fast-paced world we’ve created, we’re only going to feel more overwhelmed by the ever-increasing directions and distractions we feel pulled toward. With exponentially increasing demands on us in our work and personal lives, sustaining and improving focus on things which matter is getting tougher and tougher.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that keeping focused is no longer about trying to discover secret weapons of willpower or self-discipline. With these initial self-reflective exercises and different brain-training exercises, you’ll no longer be having arguments with yourself to get on with the job!
Here’re 7 ways on how to improve focus.
1. Have a Plan You Feel Clear AboutOne of the foremost common reasons we struggle to take care of focus is because we lack clarity about what we’d like to try to to next. The next best action step doesn’t feel clear to us.
If you are trying to lose weight but aren’t clear on exactly what activities you need to do, with what intensity, the food you need to eat and the timing of when all this needs to happen, you increase your chances of staggered progress.
If there are not enough parts early in the process to that feel clear for you to make the next step, these emotional obstacles will derail you.
You must also recognize the amount of detail in the steps you need to feel ready and confident to move forward — this will differ between you and the next person. You and another person are often given precisely the same instructions to find out a task. He/she might feel completely ready and confident to get to work. On the other hand, you hesitate.
Work on developing enough detail clarity until you are feeling you’ve got enough resources and know enough to require the steps.
2. Set Your Mood and Environment to maximise Your Capacity to FocusIt’s been argued that in slightly-above-ambient temperatures, you’ll be more creative. You feel more relaxed and your productivity increases. Conversely, lower temperatures have also been found to more positively influence decision-making ability and alertness.
Cornell University conducted a study of office administration workers whereby their productivity positively correlated with increased office temperatures.[1] At 25℃, the workers were typing with 90% accuracy. However, with a drop of 5℃, the typing rate nose-dived along side an increased error rate of 25%. The study also identified other factors which could greatly affect productivity and focus such as air quality and pollution.
It’s not just temperature you need to pay attention to. Good lighting is essential. The wavelength of blue light emitted from neon lights and most electronic devices generally ignites our serotonin levels and keeps us awake. Consider though that natural light is best where possible. When your body is truly getting tired, you can honor its natural rhythms and listen to its cues for rest.
Switch off communication applications (e.g. Facebook messenger, Slack, Yamma). Make it hard for yourself to access such applications and devices by physically putting them in places that are inconvenient for you to access (try the 20-second rule and make it take more time to access). If you have to go outside to the garden shed to retrieve your phone (and it’s cold and raining outside), you’re less likely to do it!
Maximize your exposure to visual messages which direct you to remain on task. Rather than have your eyes cast across post-it-note messages such as: “Don’t get distracted”, have messages of what you want to direct yourself to do: “Keep going. Stay focused.” Surround where you propose to execute most of your day’s work with deliberate messages that directly tell you to remain on target .
3. Create a Distraction Procrastination To-Do ListWhen you know you have to prepare a complex report or assignment, the temptation to be carried away with the social flittings of your friends on Facebook or your colleagues chatting nearby will likely be stronger than ever. That story you spin yourself that you’re only spending a smidgin’ of your time getting ‘up-to-date’ so it can’t really do any harm becomes the sole story you would like to believe.
Trying to resist the temptation completely can cost you valuable time and psychic energy . The guilt you harbor for contemplating digressing from your important activity inflicts an emotional cat-o-nine tails upon you. That doesn’t serve you either.
Submit half-way. Fully indulge at a designated time period to soak up that dopamine rush from scrolling through sporadic events and sponsored posts on your newsfeed or chat to whoever is online at the time. 
After pounding through a piece of labor , undergo that guilty pleasure. When you engage in it, do it fully. If you’ve been studying straight for three hours, it’s time to stand up, stretch and stroll to your favourite coffee shop and back. Go for a walk or swing on the swings in your closest public park.
If you work from home, bake a batch of scones, put on a face mask as you soak your feet in a foot spa. Or watch half of the football match you recorded but haven’t gotten ‘round to reviewing yet.
Cold-turkey abstinence is hardly ever effective. Not only are you wasting time and energy resisting the urge. You make the urge stronger by denying yourself! So, don’t deny yourself but manage it wisely.
4. Practice Meditation and MindfulnessIf you’re yet to be convinced of how meditation can help you improve focus, look no further than the declarations made by the American Psychological Society praising its benefits.More and more studies are demonstrating how meditation can reduce rumination, stress, anxiety and improve relationships, emotional stability, focus and working memory capacity.
If you’re not meditating, you are doing yourself a gross disservice. Meditating allows to practice regaining focus. As you practice, you learn and increase your skills to notice when your mind is wandering off track. You then practice bringing it back to what you ought to be directing your attention to.Include in your morning preparations for the day a gentle but directed review of what you need to devote your time to today. Throughout the day, consider that your attention span swings like a pendulum. Exercise it one direction and let it swing into a free-thought space for moments of reprieve.
The world, our bodies and our minds work in rhythms. Learn to exercise your mind and focus intrinsically . If you try to beat yourself cognitively into submission, you’re unlikely to win. You’ll be unnecessarily exhausting yourself in repeated attempts of trying.
Here’s a beginner guide for meditation: Meditation for Beginners: How to Meditate Deeply and Quickly
5. Schedule Planning, Review and Recognition Periods Throughout Your DayManagement consultant and best-selling author of 18 Minutes, Peter Bregman recommends a simple plan to help train your brain to remain focused and help you track your progress.
Before the computer goes on, the first 5 minutes of your day, you invest in planning and write out your ‘today’s activities’ list. Physically writing down your activity goals for the day (using paper and pen, not electronic word processing) engages more functions within your brain (e.g. the generation effect[3]) which train it to acknowledge these activities are highly important.
Bregman then recommends that for 1 minute at the end of each of the next 8 hours, you stop and recall what you have accomplished in that hour. You congratulate yourself for what you have achieved and regain focus, recalibrate expectations and take a pause. You slow down to speed up.
By reviewing what you’ve got accomplished, you attach a positive emotional experience to your work and progress. This action in itself will improve your focus as you fuel your motivation to stay the wheels of your momentum, rolling.
The final 5 minutes at the end of the day are spent in reviewing and planning the next day. Doing so makes it easy for you to sustain laser focus from at some point to subsequent , to subsequent .
These 18 minutes of planning serve as plain but powerful guard rails to keep you mentally on track.
6. Create Goals and Activities That Satisfy Your Highest Priorities and ValuesWhenever you’re resisting doing something, it’s highly likely because it’s not topping your desirability charts.
As a human being, you behave and act in ways which ultimately keep you feeling safe and comfortable. As long as we can see we will get to continue feeling safe and comfortable, it doesn’t matter what activity we’re asked to do.
However, the moment a notion arises of your needing to do something that feels unfamiliar (and hence, uncomfortable), you can guarantee you’ll feel a sting of resistance. It might be slight but it will be there. However, life doesn’t allow us to simply avoid whatever we please.
The key is to examine and reframe what you need to do in a way that does satisfy your highest values and priorities.
If you believe you know what your values and priorities are, take a look at the results you have against the goals you’ve set for yourself thus far.
For example, if you believe one of your highest priorities is to have a healthy bank balance yet your balance statement shows more outgoings than revenue, having a lot of money is actually not a high priority for you.
At now , you would like to explore the variability of activities that yield a healthy bank balance that you’re not currently exercising. Saving, reducing costs, modifying and monitoring spending habits, making wiser purchase choices and finding ways to extend your income are all activities you would like to explore. These things might sound dull and like diligence .
7. Transform Information to Make Things More InterestingAccording to neurobiologists’ findings, we learn better when we actively do different things with the information. Not only are our experiences of learning more enjoyable, we activate more parts of our brain. This serves lessons and memories to be more effectively encoded into LTM .
You need to become clever at delighting and regularly stimulating your senses through variety.
If you’re studying, engage a spread of the way to exercise using the knowledge and skills you want to develop. Discussion groups, creating informal quizzes, teaching someone the knowledge you would like to find out involves you exercising verbal communication skills where you want to both give and receive information. You must adapt to your audience.
Drawing pictures and diagrams, creating voice memos about what you’re learning, using colors and symbols again different activates different parts of the brain. More connections are developed in your neural circuitry to aid your recall.
Furthermore, you become more adaptable and adept at applying what you learn to different situations.
Creating your own personalized manuals and notes becomes a passion project which pushes the personal gratification scale higher and higher.
Before you know it, staying focused no longer feels like a chore