4 rules for being more focused and disciplined

I’m design-hacking my life (Part 2)

I get easily distracted—both on the day-to-day, minute-to-minute level and the “What do I do with my life?” level. On the micro level, I get severe FOMO, checking email, texts, Facebook every 10 minutes because what if I’m missing out on something important? On the macro level, at any one time there are a million different goals, startup ideas, and art projects I wish I had the bandwidth to be working on.

I didn’t notice just how unfocused I could be until I stopped working from home. When I was in control of how I allocated my entire 24 hours, I intertwined my personal and professional lives and would just stay up until I got everything I wanted to do done. But now that I cannot (should not) do that anymore, I’ve had to be more strict about how effectively and efficiently I spend both my leisure and my working time.

So these are some of the things I have attempted to do to be more disciplined and focused, on both the micro and macro levels—and some things that I am currently attempting, because this is most definitely a work in progress.

Part 2 of a series on life hacks: being more focused and disciplined. See part 1 on being more productive, part 3 on being healthier, and part 4 on what I know about being happy.

On the micro level

1—I put nearly everything into Pocket.

Pocket is quite possibly the best thing that’s ever happened for my productivity. It’s an app that lets you save articles and videos for later viewing (I use it to save articles to read on the subway). It took me a while to come around to the conclusion that if I relied solely on willpower to refrain from distractedly surfing the web, I’d fail, miserably.

So Pocket salvages my productivity from a behavior that I know I need to change but have not been able to (yet). It is my contingency plan. I swear it’s cut down my distracted browsing time by at least 80%.

So to start off with, plan for when you’ll fail.

2—I make it harder to be distracted.

Alternatively, I’ve also tried to make it harder to fail in the first place. The best way to resist distraction is to not encounter it at all, right?

So I’ve:

• Become brutal with what I allow into my inbox. At one point I unsubscribed from all shopping emails, daily deal emails, blog newsletters, event announcements—essentially everything that I would just ‘Mark As Read’ and ‘Archive’ without ever opening.
• Deleted my Facebook bookmark (note: this did not work ☺)
• Turned off push notifications and badge counts on my phone for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. The badge count is off for my mail app as well.
• Started putting my phone on silent whenever I’m in the office.
• Stopped keeping both Gmail and Facebook tabs open at work.

Not that I don’t continue to check my phone and open up all of my social apps constantly anyway, but since I’m no longer getting pushed notifications, I can feel my brain feeling slightly less chaotic. And I do find that I can focus for longer periods of time now.

So, wherever possible, remove distractions.

On the macro level

3—I am not going to (let myself) work on more than one big project at a time.

On the big picture level, removing distractions becomes harder. I’m grateful when I come across new opportunities. But whenever I encounter a new startup idea, art project, or personal goal, I get really excited and want to start working on it right away. My last business idea was a bacon delivery service, inspired by Valentine’s Day. The one before that was an online community of drawing coaches whom I could ask to give me drawing feedback virtually and on-demand.

I’m starting to come around to the belief, though, that…

The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at a time.
—Richard Cech

There are a lot of things I hope I eventually get around to doing. But in order to mitigate my inclination to pile everything onto my plate at once, RIGHT NOW, I keep a backlog of ideas, so that I can forget about all of them except one.

“Pocket” the big things too. One thing at a time.

4—I am going to start picking goals that freak me out a little.

I came across this one by accident.

For the last two years, I have wanted to “blog more.” Both times, I quantified it. I put it on my to do list for the year. In 2012 I wanted to do 20 posts, and I only did 17. In 2013 I aimed for 12, thinking one post a month would put me in a routine, and I did 10.

I can’t remember where this idea came from, but for some reason, I decided that I wanted to write 50 Medium posts by the time I turn 27 next year. And to my surprise, I am actually keeping to it.

Fifty posts means I need to do one pretty much every single week. This means there will not be a single day over the course of the next year when I will not need to either be writing or thinking about writing.

It’s so stressful to think about. But it’s also really, really satisfying to be able to hit that ‘Publish’ button every week (or so).

So: make goals that force you to get started, right now.

Do you have any tips of your own for being more disciplined and focused? Let me know! I need all the help I can get. ☺

As a part of my endeavor to rediscover my first love — writing — I’m writing one thing every week, for a year. If you enjoyed this, please click “Recommend” below, say hi on Twitter, or come find me on Instagram! I’d love to hear from you. ☺

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   I’m design-hacking my life (Part 1)
2. 5 rules for being healthier
   I’m design-hacking my life (Part 3)
3. 10 things I know about being happy
4. How to design a 365 day project
   From the trenches: I’m on day 300 of 365 days of learning how to draw
5. How to become a morning person (and have fun while you’re at it)
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