Photo Credit: Picpedia
Click. Click. Click.
Notifications. Notifications. Notifications.
Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.
We live and work these days in a culture of distraction where focus is a rare commodity.
“The culture of distraction makes your ability to think deeply and creatively constantly threatened. Conceiving ideas and putting them into practice requires time for reflection, and for that you need a personal organization method like GTD: if you are able to create a space where you can think and reflect, you will be able to move forward with more things, with less energy and less time.” – Francisco Sáez
Doing research this morning on focus, I came across the Tweet below:
When you see the adjective "smart" applied to things, as in smart home, smart clothes, smart toys, smart phone — substitute the term "hackable." They always come together.
— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) December 13, 2018
All these devices can make our lives hackable, too. Our deep thinking time…our complex problem-solving capability…vulnerable.
What can we do to recover our focus? To be able to expand our recall and use our memory…our mind to its greatest capacity?
Entrepreneur and teacher/mentor William Treseder, co-founder of BMNT has written a book on this topic:
Reset: Building Purpose in the Age of Digital Distraction
Photo Credit: Amazon
While you’re waiting for the book to arrive, Treseder has also written a rapid read on focus where he outlines The Two Things Killing Your Ability to Focus . Those two killers are screen distractions (smart phones/tablets) and meetings.
He offers 5 easily executable ways out of our mental chaos and into focus. They are listed below but don’t miss his commentary on each here.
- Practice mindfulness.
- Organize tasks.
- Clean up.
- Shrink meetings.
- Preserve buffers.
I am personally very easily distracted. To make these few adjustments is worth getting my focus back. Thoughts?
Oh…last thing: Treseder also wrote a thought-provoking piece on How to Develop a Mission Mentality. This takes the issue of focus to a much more “big picture” place. When we have set the “why” and “who” of our daily focus, we are compelled to stay at the task and bring others with us. That is mission mentality.
10 Tips to Stay Focused – Francisco Sáez
Photo Credit: James Clear