Step 4: Focus On Functionality
Facebook, text messages, TheChive, The Awesomer, IWasteSoMuchTime.com, Youtube, Email, LinkedIn, Geek.com, io9.com, Twitter, Instagram. These are just some of my favorite distractions and they can very quickly turn my day into an entertaining but very unproductive experience.
How can I possibly be expected to get anything done when there is an entire world of geeky, awesome, hilarious, entertaining content waiting at my fingertips at any given moment? Well unfortunately the reality is I can’t…
If I want to truly be productive then I need to drastically up my focus and reduce my addictions. After scrounging around the interwebs for the last few weeks I was quite surprised to find how many simple and awesome solutions there was to this problem.
News Feed Eradicator for Facebook:
Let’s not lie to ourselves here…if you use Facebook you have 100% come to terms with it’s useless but completely addictive format. Whether you’re creeping on profiles, scrolling the newsfeed, or watching funny but dumb dog fail videos Facebook can eat up hours of your day without you even noticing. So what’s the solution here? You’re not going to ‘stop’ using Facebook but much like junk food you can try and at least cut out the fat.
News Feed Eradicator for Facebook does exactly that, you can use the ‘meat and potatoes’ of Facebook (profiles, pages, etc.) but when you click back to the newsfeed you get a ‘get back to work’ motivational quote where your feed would normally be. This has actually helped me a lot; just limiting my scrolling while at work has kept me on task a lot more often and drastically limited my social media junk food consumption.
StayFocused:
Similar to News Feed Eradicator for Facebook, StayFocusd is a Google Chrome extension that helps to increase your productivity by limiting the amount of time that you can spend on time-wasting websites. So basically all of my nerdy, funny, and geeky sites would only get a time limit of 30 minutes a day (cause a guy’s still gotta get his geek on at least once per day). Also try RescueTime as well.
The Pomodoro Technique:
This is actually a really interesting concept about staying focused and on task. Rather than hitting it as hard as you can for as long as you can on one single project and then either completing the task or burning out and petering off, you instead can simply set a timer for usually 25 minutes and once it’s done just take a break. The concept relies on the theory that frequent breaks will actually improve mental agility and allow you to get more done. I’ve been using another chrome extension called Pomodoro Timer and it’s actually been helping quite a bit.
Work on what your brain wants to work on
So often I find myself trying to work on a project that I know is a high priority but I just can’t seem to get going on it. It’ll be 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, my coffee will have long worn off and I just won’t be able to focus on the highly cognitive task. This is usually when I become frustrated and often relent to just watch funny videos on one of my websites. After talking to a friend about this problem he offered me a far better solution. He simply said, “Just work on something your brain wants to work on.” In other words if your mind can’t focus on your current challenging project just switch to something else that’s a lower gear but you know you still have to get done. Maybe that’s graphic design, maybe it’s research, maybe it’s scheduling, whatever it is as long as it’s still productive then your still getting further ahead. Often after taking a mental break for a while you’ll find you can actually come back to your big project and your brain will be good to go.
Make your work flow efficient
This is something else I borrowed from my friend Tim Ferriss and The Four Hour Work Week, but it’s so genius and simple I had to include it. Rather than being a slave to your email, voicemail’s, and other notifications Tim suggests to instead make them wait for you. If you are constantly being pulled off of your projects to answer a quick email or respond to a quick Facebook message then your work will always take that much longer to finish.
Schedule a time first thing in the morning and later in the afternoon to check and respond to emails and other notifications. Make sure everyone knows this is how you will be operating so that they won’t be upset when you’re not immediately responding (you can use an auto-reply on your email, etc to warn everyone). Let them know if someone desperately needs to get a hold of you for something they can always call you. This will create so much efficiency in your day and help you to be far more productive between your peak work hours.
Step 5: Go On an Information Diet
The final thing I’ll borrow from Tim’s book (it was really good by the way so if you haven’t read it definitely check it out) is the concept of an information diet.
Our brains can only focus on so many things at one time and for some reason we are conditioned to endlessly fill them up with information until they completely overflow. If you really want to be able to stay focused and accomplish your goals you can’t be thinking, stressing, or reacting to what’s happening with things that has no immediate impact or value for you or your loved ones.
This means you need to stop listening/watching the news, reading magazines and even scrolling geeky or nerd culture websites. It’s not that these things aren’t important but they really don’t offer a lot of value to your life and if they’re not that critical to you it probably means you can have little influence over them anyways. For example: That movie you were looking forward to will still be a big letdown (looking at you here Batman v Superman), the news will still make you frustrated and politics will still boggle your mind. Why should you waste your already scarce time and mental capacity on things that only distract you from your far more important goal.
Now I’m not saying you have to cut these things out of your life forever, actually far from it. But if you can diet off of these distractions for just a month or two while your at your busiest then imagine how much more you could accomplish. I’ve stopped listening to CBC World Report in the morning and NRP in the car. I’ve limited myself to just trailers of new movies and not in depth nerdy forums and discussions about how much they are going to suck and or hopefully kick ass. It may not be much but I’ve definitely noticed that I’m thinking less about the things that don’t matter to me and more about the goals and relationships that do.
