Work-Life Balance: Finding Focus Through Distraction
Virtually my entire academic career I’ve struggled with focus; staying productive. At a young age, I was diagnosed with ADD. I recall this being around 5th or 6th grade. At that time I really didn’t have any idea of what that meant, all I knew was that I couldn’t place my attention on something for more than a couple minutes. Over the course of the next decade or so I tried nearly every “study drug” under the sun. Adderall, Ritalin, and my most common, Vyvanse. I took the patch version in grade school and took the pill version on and off during high school and college.
Let me tell you, that shit is a wild ride. The fact that they are feeding these drugs to millions of children worldwide is astonishing.
Every day would be the same experience. I would take my medication and transform into a walking zombie. I wouldn’t eat, I wouldn’t socialize, I wouldn’t relax, and it’d make my speech worse. I’d be in this constant state of being “in the zone”, whatever that was. And a lot of time that wouldn’t even help my focus, or at least not my focus on the things that needed to get done. The focus would apply to anything and everything, even the things that weren’t my school work. I hated it. I grew a dependency on it and thought that I couldn’t get any work done without it.
Thankfully, the real world changed my perspective on that. It wasn’t until I started working full time when I completely stopped taking these soul-sucking drugs. I was able to become the full version of myself, and I couldn’t have been happier about it. I had more energy and I started talking to people, but my focus still was lacking. I had to find some way to improve and had no desire to rely on drugs to do so.
A couple of things happened over the course of the next few years:
1. I learned to work
It sounds very elementary, but it’s true. During school, I never really learned how to work and study without the use of aid. When I became a working professional, I learned to do the work that I didn’t want to do. I believe they call it “discipline”. It’s easy for me to dive into work I’m passionate about and have a great interest in, but unfortunately, as Sean Evans once said, “Every job, becomes a job.” So I had to teach myself selective focus. Deep Work by Cal Newport was a massive resource for me. It’s a book I return to quite often to remind myself of the tools and importance of staying focused in a world with so much going on. Get rid of all distractions and lock yourself in a room if need be.
2. I learned to let go
Possibly the most important of this list, I learned not to fight with myself. I would spend (and still do) so much time being frustrated as to why I couldn’t just get shit done and focus. Meditation and mindfulness have been the biggest help with this. Accepting these thoughts and moving forward. Not forcing a struggle in the mind. I’ve only been practicing this for a couple of years now and still would consider myself a novice but it’s like anything else, practice makes perfect. The mind is a muscle and you have to work to constantly improve it. Let it breathe from time-to-time. Go on that hike, grab a drink with friends, watch some TV for a little bit, scroll through Twitter. All of that is OK if you just put the time aside that you need to complete the task in front of you. Why even take the free-time if you’re not going to enjoy it? Your mind only has a select number of hours in the day it can focus before it’s just running on empty. Manage your time accordingly and allow for proper work-life balance. We’d go crazy without it.
3. I learned to focus on the feeling
I remember when this idea first crossed my mind. It was during my second year of working professionally and I was writing in my personal journal when I asked myself, “What if I focused on the feeling of accomplishment?” Once this idea was planted in my brain, I didn’t super actively work on it, but that reminder to tap into that feeling reared its head every now and then when I was working. And slowly, I grew accustomed to it. I grew to love it. At the very least, be aware of it. Finally, I used it as fuel to get shit done.
I still envy the people who can just sit down to commit 100% of their brainpower to a task for hours on end. That was never me. I’m confident in the work I produce when I do focus, but always consider how much more I could accomplish if had that level of attention.
Making the decision to come back to school was a scary thought at first. Would I slip back into my old ways in college and high school? Would I have to rely on aids like caffeine or amphetamines to make sure that I stayed focused? These questions crossed my mind, but I knew I could handle the challenge. In fact, for the first time, I felt like I was ready for it. By trusting myself, letting myself get distracted with some freedom, and coming back to that feeling of accomplishment, I felt like I developed an arsenal of tools I could use to get shit done. And I feel like I’m doing pretty damn good so far.
