Maintaining focus in a distracting world
There are a lot of distractions in the world right now. Here’s a strategy to help you maintain focus through it all.
There’s a lot going on in the world right now. If you spend much of your day working in an Internet-connected situation, breaking away from the constant stream of news and notifications to focus on being productive can be a major struggle.
As a solo entrepreneur, this is a problem that I absolutely can’t allow to get out of hand. There’s no one to pick up the slack if I’m not being consistently productive. So maintaining focus isn’t just important for me, it’s THE MOST important aspect of my day-to-day professional life. When I’m working on Writing.AI, I need to be making concrete, steady progress.
But it’s not that simple. Everything about modern technology is designed to distract us. Smartphones provide a never-ending parade of beeps, buzzes, and flashy lights that mostly just exist to take advantage of your poor, dopamine-addled brain. And that’s just the notifications! Checking your email, opening Twitter, or (no, please!) reading the news are invitations to 20+ minutes of lost productivity.
When it comes to my professional life, I’m a pretty focused, productive individual. This wasn’t always the case. Back when I was in college and early into my career, staying focused was a real struggle at times. So as I gained experience, this was one of the skills I worked the hardest to understand and develop.
Today, I’m much more in control of my attention. Since going full-time on my startup this past March, I’ve made tangible progress on the company or product every single day. This during what might be the most digitally distracting five-month period in modern history.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight. But there were definitely some clear patterns that emerged, and eventually I developed a framework to eliminate distractions, maintain focus, and ensure a steady stream of productivity when stuff really, really needs to get done.
So without any further ado, here’s my approach for maintaining focus during the work day when the sky is constantly falling:
1. Internalize your current priority
The first step is to always know what your top priority is. After that, you need to put it down on paper. Real, physical paper. With a pen. And then repeat that process every single night before you go to bed. Doing it again in the morning doesn’t hurt, either.
The purpose of this step is to transform that top priority from a thought you’ve put on paper to the object of your focus.
If you’re struggling with focus, you need to internalize that priority more than anything else. It needs to become an integral part of your identity, at least temporarily.
You are no longer just Abby. You’re now Abby-Who-Is-Getting-That-Stripe-Integration-Done. That’s an Abby with a purpose, one who understands that she needs to be able to take payments so she doesn’t run out of cash. That’s an Abby with an outcome to focus on.
Once you’ve become that new Abby, the one who’s finishing that Stripe integration, you’ve gained a major toehold to help you climb past your distracting overlords. Now that you’ve internalized your current goal, there’s something for you to affix your attention to when your mind starts to drift.
This is really important. Without it, you’ll be at risk of reaching out for distractions, since you don’t have a default thing to focus on.
2. Eliminate digital inbound distractions
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork for your ability to maintain internal focus, let’s talk about how to prevent incoming distractions from reaching out for you.
If you really want to maintain focus, this is a critical step. You need to shut out the vast majority of the distractions in your life, digital or otherwise.
If your phone vibrates, beeps, or lights up for anything other than emergencies, you need to turn that behavior off during periods of productivity. In a lot of cases, you can just turn these notifications off permanently without any personal loss.
Can’t selectively disable notifications for an app you rely on? Nearly all smartphones have a do-not-disturb (DND) mode. If you’re not already doing so, learn to use it and enjoy uninterrupted happiness and clarity of mind. Airplane mode also works great, although it’s less customizable regarding high-priority notifications (in case of emergencies).
Shutting out distractions from your phone is just the beginning. Next, you need to shut out distractions from your laptop. Close those Gmail tabs. Kill Slack. Don’t even think of opening Facebook or Twitter. Anyone who thinks they need to be able to reach you immediately via these channels at all times is an attention vampire and should be shunned and avoided. If you can disconnect from the Internet altogether, by all means do that.
There are distractions that don’t even look like distractions. Developers are crafty. That swipe-to-refresh website visitor log? It’s manipulating you. Close it and gain a productivity power up. Ditto that tab with the Github issue you filed a couple days ago. If there’s a chance that a website’s title will change to add a (1) due to some event out of your control, then CLOSE THAT TAB and reclaim your attention.
Practice distraction whack-a-mole. If you see a notification that isn’t critical, that you absolutely did not need (hey look, a bill-due reminder for that credit card payment I made two weeks ago!), then block it. Stop letting your phone control you and control it.
3. Eliminate physical inbound distractions
Okay, so at this point you’ve prioritized and internalized the thing you want to work on and killed as many distractions as reasonably possible. Now you’re ready to work, right?! No, not really.
Before you can get to work, you still need to work on blocking physical distractions. This means:
- Getting away from people or pets or construction projects that seek to siphon off your fleeting seconds of uninterrupted focus time; and
- Placing a protective barrier around your brain to protect it from rogue, malicious noises. And by protective barrier, I mean headphones.
You’ll almost certainly be better off wearing headphones if your goal is to avoid being distracted. They both signal to others to leave you alone, and can be made to provide helpful sounds that are better than other sounds at not distracting you.
Okay, so now you’re ready to work! You go to your distraction-free work place, open your shiny laptop, slide your headphones on, and away you go!
4. Remove and block outbound distractions
Smooth sailing now, right? Hah! No way. You have Ingrained Behaviors. Those are gonna cost you.
You see, after years of manipulation, your brain will just sort of naturally start cycling through the websites and apps that have reliably rewarded it for the effort of ensuring your loyal devotion.
So although you’re all about writing that Stripe integration, your fingers are somehow still going to Alt-Tab over to the browser, Cmd-T a new tab, type ‘re’, and hit the autocomplete for reddit.com because that’s how this all works.
You’re probably not going to be able to stop this habit through will power alone. You need to erect some barriers to the behavior. Here’s a strategy to get you started:
- First, you need to clear reddit.com, facebook.com, twitter.com, yahoo.com, craigslist.com, news.google.com, and whatever else you constantly check for a distraction fix from your browser suggestions.
- Second, you need to get one (or maybe multiple) browser extensions that block sites. Then go ahead and add all of the sites that you can’t stop visiting and do everything possible to prevent removal of that extension until you’ve broken those website-opening habits. It might take a few weeks, but this is absolutely doable.
Okay, so now you’ve blocked these sites, and you’re ready to go. Right? No. Turn your phone off (or put it in airplane mode) and put it in your bag. Get it out of sight.
Okay… now? Almost! You should now be at a point where you’ve blocked the majority of external distractions, and got a hold on internal distractions.
You can now start focusing on focusing.
5. Break your task down
Before you can dive all the way into rocking that Stripe integration, you need to know the exact steps for making that happen.
In other words, you need to break that goal down into small, actionable steps. This is really, really important for maintaining focus. If you don’t give your mind precise clarity on what you want it to do for you, it’ll resist helping.
You know what doesn’t require clarity? That sudoku website that you used to visit but stopped because it got boring (…but only after you’d wasted a week of your life for no benefit whatsoever).
Like lightning, your brain will choose the path of least resistance.
In breaking your task down into bite-sized pieces, your goal is to make it easier to do the next step than it would be to tear down the barricades you’ve erected to keep the focus-stealing vampires at bay.
6. Addressing elephants
What if you’re distracted by something more substantial? Maybe you have a game on your laptop or phone that you can’t stop playing, or a really tough problem that you can’t bring yourself to dive back into because it’s too daunting?
If you’re dealing with a powerful draw, like a game you’re addicted to, then your only realistic option is to delete it. Just do it. Nike swoosh. Go cold turkey. Wipe all of your saved scores, give away all your gold, delete your account, delete the app. Whatever you need to do, use a burst of self-annoyance to sever that tie and burn all bridges. Don’t look back.
If the barrier to focus is work-related, like a really tough problem, there are a few different approaches to take.
First, make sure that you absolutely need to solve this problem. The best solution to any problem is to not have to solve it at all.
Alternatively, if you have to find a solution yet can’t maintain focus, it may be a sign that you lack understanding or interest in the problem. In either case, the best course of action is to enlist the help of someone else, even in an informal capacity.
A few weeks ago I was struggling to annotate writing samples, a critical task for building Writing.AI. After wrestling with the problem for several days, I asked my wife for some help over the weekend. For the next two days, she helped attack the problem from a different direction than I’d been taking, and the following week I ran roughshod over the mental roadblocks that had been standing in my way.
If you can’t find someone to help but still really need to tackle a problem, then your best bet may be to try move from an outcome-focused approach and instead shift to a process-focused approach.
Specifically, go through the minimal steps of getting to a solution (even if that’s a terrible, embarrassingly bad solution). Then look at what you’ve created and figure out where you can improve it, piece by piece.
Unless you’re designing a bridge or working on a mathematical proof, this strategy should help you break free from most mental shackles.
7. Take care of yourself
In addition to everything else I’ve recommended in this article, there’s one other thing that’s absolutely critical. You need to take care of yourself.
You need to sleep well regularly, exercise, and eat well. If you’re not even close to doing all three of those things currently, start with your sleep schedule. Maintaining focus while you’re tired is a bear.
Once you’re getting enough sleep, try adding some long walks to your daily schedule. After that, start working on your diet. Take things slowly, but keep at it!
Oh, and take some time for yourself. Your brain needs a chance to recharge from time to time.
Created With Writing.AI
This article is part of a series drafted using Writing.AI, a new approach to writing designed to make the process faster, easier, and more accessible. If this sounds interesting to you, sign up for a launch announcement at https://writing.ai or follow @writingai on Twitter.
