How to increase concentration, productivity, and remove distractions

A few months ago my father and I were sit­ting out­side of a nice café under the shade hav­ing some cof­fee when he told me this anal­ogy in regards to men­tal focus. I’ll try to con­vey the ini­tial story and then build up on it.

Think about the power of sunlight.

When you put your hand under the sun, it feels nice and warm but noth­ing really hap­pens.  How­ever, if you use a lit­tle mag­ni­fy­ing glass and focus the light, it gets con­cen­trated and now that same sun­light can burn your hand almost instantly.  The con­cen­tra­tion is so pow­er­ful it could even start a fire!

The same goes for your men­tal focus and con­cen­tra­tion.  Your atten­tion span is pre­cious and dis­trac­tions are every­where that keep your focus dif­fused and weak.  You really need to hone in on what it is you’re doing to be effec­tive.  Focus is what’s nec­es­sary to make full use of your power.

Set a count-down timer for an hour and focus intently.

Who knows what beau­ti­ful cre­ations you can cre­ate when you focus intently?

An easy way to increase your pro­duc­tiv­ity is to work in sprints.  Don’t try to run a marathon all day as that’s not very real­is­tic, or healthy in this case.

Instead, take the role of the sprinter and charge through your work with great inten­sity one hour at a time with­out any dis­trac­tions.  You’ll be able to get incred­i­ble amounts of work done and your pro­duc­tiv­ity will sky­rocket the same way a mag­ni­fy­ing glass ampli­fies sunlight.

If you check your favorite web­sites spo­rad­i­cally in between your work, your focus will con­stantly be dif­fused and it will take you (infi­nitely) longer to fin­ish your work.

Use this fan­tas­tic web­site to use as your one hour timer:  www.magicworkcycle.com

Remove the dis­trac­tions; Prac­tice “infor­ma­tion fasting.”

Other than striv­ing for super-productivity one hour at a time, setup an envi­ron­ment that fos­ters your attention:

Keep your desk clean and clut­ter free.  Your brain is con­stantly pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion through its senses and deter­min­ing what is impor­tant and what is not.  If your desk is visu­ally dis­tract­ing, that exter­nal chaos will hin­der your abil­ity to focus.

“Out of sight, out of mind” is a very use­ful phrase to remem­ber.  When you need to focus on your work, put your phone on silent and throw it in a drawer or some­where out of sight.  If e-mail gets pushed to your phone, set it up so that you have to man­u­ally retrieve it instead of it con­stantly noti­fy­ing you of use­less things.  If other unnec­es­sary noti­fi­ca­tions are con­stantly for­warded to your phone, maybe it’s time to adjust those settings.

If you need to research on the Inter­net, use the tech­nol­ogy more inten­tion­ally and with unwa­ver­ing pur­pose.  If you don’t need the Inter­net, phys­i­cally dis­con­nect the Eth­er­net cable or tem­porar­ily dis­able your wire­less con­nec­tion.  When you uncon­sciously go to your favorite web­site and see the “Server Not Found” mes­sage you will be pretty shocked and will be forced to go right back to your work.

Subconscious-sabotage is real.

You know when you have a big test to study for but you’re pro­cras­ti­nat­ing end­lessly?  Isn’t it inter­est­ing how you’ll mag­i­cally become very cre­ative at find­ing any­thing and every­thing to do that doesn’t involve study­ing for that test?

What about when you’re in the mid­dle of some­thing impor­tant and you impul­sively open a new tab and load Face­book as if you were on auto pilot? Or maybe you decide to ran­domly get up and check if there’s any­thing new in the fridge for the fifth time?

These are all exam­ples of things that pur­posely cre­ate delay in your work.  They tend to hap­pen auto­mat­i­cally (and seam­lessly) when you get to the “hard part” of your task.  This is what’s known as subconscious-self-sabotage.

Your sub­con­scious is often dri­ven out of fear and wants you to stay in its com­fort zone where every­thing feels safe and easy.  Some­times you may be so good at sab­o­tag­ing your­self that you may com­pletely aban­don entire projects with­out real­iz­ing after weeks have gone by!

Please be aware of these habits because they are very sub­tle and easy to give into.  Sub­con­scious self sab­o­tage is as real as the food you will eat in your next meal.  Once you become self-aware of your habits you can gain con­trol and grow faster than ever.

I hope this info helps some of you out there.  It’s very impor­tant that we cul­ti­vate our willpower one solid-hour at a time and remove the dis­trac­tions that frac­ture our atten­tion.  Smart­phones, social media net­works, and the Inter­net are only going to be more inte­grated within our lives so it’s prob­a­bly best that we get a grip on these things before they cause us to waste too much time.  I give a spe­cial thanks to my father for pro­vid­ing the anal­ogy of the mag­ni­fy­ing glass and jump-starting (or should I say, fire-starting) the sub­se­quent ideas in my head.

What are some things you do to deal with dis­trac­tions? What are some things you do to increase your focus?

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