How to Focus Better: A Guide in 6 Steps
Focus! It’s not just for cameras. Life takes smarts to do it right. And not just smarts, but enough attention to actually learn something new. Or allow your creativity to create wonderful new realities for you. Or take sustained action. Or just put more than two thoughts together.
You can focus on many levels. If you’re creating a Black Curse to send all the inhabitants of the Enchanted Kingdom to a fishing village in Maine, you might need to sustain your focus for weeks or months. For that, you need project management, or Get-it-Done Groups. That will be a separate exercise.
Today, we’re talking about short-term focus. The kind of focus you need if you just want to write a coherent blog post. Or take your weekly deep dive into a fascinating new aspect of the mating habits of naked, blind mole-rats. Or come up with a strategy for convincing Eliza Dushku to make a guest appearance on your podcast.
Focus Is Hard. Really Hard.
Focus is a skill. And in a world that’s trying to distract you at every turn, you need to treat it like a skill. Practice. Really practice. So let’s break it down. We’ll master the “micro-skills” that go into focus.
Micro-skill 1: Eliminate External Interruptions
If you’re going to focus, you’re gonna focus. Take a moment and list all the ways the outside world can stomp on your psyche. Let me help:
- Your smartphone can pop up notifications, blings, and bings. Turn on Do Not Disturb mode, put it on silent (turn off vibrate as well), or just turn the entire thing off.
- Your computer can pop up notifications, blings, and bings. You probably need to work on your computer because everyone needs to work on the computer.
- Helpful coworkers knock on your office door. Close it and put a sign up saying “Non-emergency interruptions will be fed to my pet.” Don’t specify what the pet is. That makes it much scarier.
- Helpful boyfriends, girlfriends, spousal equivalents, and polyamorous family units knock on your home-office door. Close it and put a sign up saying “Non-emergency interruptions mean no nookie tonight. Letting me work undisturbed, however, makes me especially cuddly.”
- Your kids can demand you drive them to soccer practice. Which is weird, because they don’t even play soccer. Surgically implant GPS trackers under their skin and send them out to play wherever they want. All kids used to play that way. The world is far safer now than 20 years ago. They’ll be fine.
- The cat can demand to be let out. This is a cat we’re talking about. Of course you’ll stop what you’re doing and let the cat out. That’s simply the way the world is.
Micro-skill 2: Eliminate Internal Distractions
Even if you’re alone in your office, you’re free to work…or to distract yourself. Now, you have to be able to handle that.
- Shut down all programs on your computer except the ones you’re using.
- You’re trying to get Eliza Dushku to make a guest appearance, right? So grab all those old tax returns, the car registration sticker (I really should put that on my car someday), the 83% Off mattress coupons, and everything else on your desk, and set them to the side. Yes, even that audit notice from the tax authorities. Trust me. If you forget about it, someone will remind you.
- Close every browser tab except the one you’re working on right now. If you think you need to keep all the tabs open, you’re wrong. Close them. If you still think you’ll never find them again, you’re wrong. You found them once, you’ll find them again. If you still think they’re critical to your future, and without them, you’ll die in a gutter pissing your pants and smelling of rotgut, you may have serious psychological problems and should probably consider therapy. But I’ll humor you. Go to your brower’s Bookmarks menu and choose Add bookmarks for these tabs…to save all your open bookmarks in a folder on your shortcuts bar. Now, close every browser tab.
(Amazingly, while writing this, as soon as I was done writing about closing browser tabs, I switched to my browser and got distracted for five minutes. See!? This is serious. Close that browser!)
Micro-skill 3: Have a DISTRACTION TO-DO List for Taming the Strays
As you work, you’ll have thoughts. Hopefully. Thoughts like, “I wonder if I still remember the correct recipe for Caesar Salad? I’m almost sure there are 12 ingredients, and I can only remember nine of them off the top of my head.” You then just pop open a new tab in your browser and…STOP!
You are, of course, familiar with my previous episode: How to Tame Your Distractible Mind. So you keep your piece of paper labeled Distraction To-Do List right next to you on your desk. You can have distracting thoughts, sure, but the moment you start to take action on those thoughts, write the action down on your Distraction To-Do List instead and stick to your focus task.
Micro-skill 4: Prime Your Mind
Get out the materials related to your focus task and put them around your otherwise-empty desk. Even though you won’t necessarily look at them consciously, your unconscious mind is influenced by the things in your environment.
You want everything around you to keep your mind thinking about Eliza Dushku. So you put your favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer memorabilia around, your commerative Dollhouse mug, your Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H T-shirt, and your Banshee poster all where you can see them.
And who knows? Maybe having a critical mass of memorabilia will send out psychic signals to her agent to call you. Don’t laugh. It could happen.
Get To Work!
Once you’ve handled interruptions and distractions, and you’ve primed your mind, it’s time to work.
Focus. Do the thing. You may want to set a timer so you know when to stop. That way, you can immerse yourself totally into Focus, without worrying about when your time is up. Your entire being can work out networking strategies to find Ms. Dushku. Or you can absorb 200 pages on naked mole-rat courtship subtleties. Soon you’ll know if they send each other mix tapes, or Spotify playlists. Or maybe you’ll finish your blog post.
Do the thing that needs the focus.
Micro-skill 5: Notice When You’re Off Track
When you’re in Flow mode, there’s only a slim chance you could somehow get off track. Here’s one way to stay aware: set a timer to go off every 5 or 10 minutes. When it goes off, just make a checkmark on your distraction to-do list paper if you’re working on your focus task. If you’re not, make an x-mark. That alone should be enough to pull you back on track. But if not, for every x-mark on your paper at the end of your focus time, send a $50 contribution to the cause you hate worst in the world. I did that. Once. You’d be amazed what a powerful motivator that is to keep you on track.
If you can’t think of a cause, think FOX News or MSNBC.
Micro-skill 6: Recovery
The last skill you need is recovering when you’ve gotten off track. Don’t just jump right back into your focus task. Notice what distracted you and do what you can to keep it from happening again. Repeat your non-interruption ritual: close your door, close unrelated browser tabs, set your timer, and get back into focus. After all, if you’re going to be interviewing Eliza Dushku, like any good interviewer, you need to know how to keep the focus on her message.
When there’s stuff to do that requires sustained concentration, make sure you have all the skills you need to focus. Resist external interruptions. Dispel internal distractions. Have a handy Distraction to-do list to catch stray thoughts. Prime your mind with your topics. And then notice when you wander and get back on track. The digital age has all but destroyed most of our ability to stay on task, but once you master these micro-skills, you’ll…oh look! A squirrel!
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you’re an entrepreneur, self-employed or otherwise need to control your own time, Get-it-Done groups help you start finishing what’s important, and develop the habits you need to be hyper-productive. Learn more at Stever Robbins.
If you enjoy this podcast, please leave an honest review on iTunes at itunes.com/getitdoneguy. Reviews really help, a lot!
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
