Losing focus once in a while is quite a natural thing. But losing concentration now and then after paying some short periods of attention is chronic. If you notice that you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing for at least 20 minutes, then you’re losing focus.
But losing focus is quite common. Sadly, many people think that they must have ADHD or any disorder for being such a scatterbrained. Taking a medication, supplement or some pill is not the answer for these woes. It’s just a matter of habit and routine.
While it is difficult to unravel the connection between focus and excellence, we know for a fact that the ability to focus is one of the mental assets possessed by every successful person. Develop the habit of paying attention or being mindful by starting with these simple techniques:
Allocate only one priority task each day. Although you know that you may finish other tasks, you will make a chief improvement if you select only one task that you cannot compromise on. Making this a priority will naturally align your behavior to this one particular intention and responsibility, thus helping you to stay focused and motivated.
It will hold you in place and keeps you from worrying about other tasks that you may not finish. At the end of the day, you feel a sense of reward knowing that, at least, you finish something. This is because that something is a task which your brain believes to be the most important thing for the day. If you’re lucky, you will do other tasks if you have the remaining time.
Save your energy, not time. Know which time your body is at its highest performance capacity. For instance, if a particular learning task demands you to be creative, select the time of the day in which you are most creative, say, at night when everything is silent and everybody’s asleep or in the morning right after you wake up.
Mostly, writers feel a surge of creativity and fresh ideas in the morning, while other artists are visited by their muse in the dead of the night. If you are a businessman or in the finance industry, you may feel that you deliberate your best tactical decisions during the time right after you finish your lunch. The time for full level of absorption is different for each person and for each kind of activity.
Thus, instead of trying to maximize time, manage your energy instead and save your resources. The strategies over which you use your time well may prove to be useless if you only exhausted your energy for a task while at your lowest performance level.
Disengage away from social media sites and chat applications. It is no news that digital socialization is the greatest time waster.
If you are trying to learn something, fix a particular time in which your time and attention are fully fixated on that activity. Take out any device that may distract you, such as phones, laptops, radios and televisions. If you are using your computer or the internet as a learning material, you may have to hide away the applications or turn off the internet which will make you anticipate any message or notification.
Set your phone on silent mode or leave it in another room. If you’re using your computer, put the applications such as Word or Evernote in full screen mode so that it is the only thing you see on your desktop.