Mastering Focus: The Key to Productivity, Clarity, and Success in a Distracted World
Let's talk about focus today. One of the key aspects of life that probably people from the young generation really struggle with because of social media and other stuff. Being someone who did my Masters in Computer Science, I knew focusing is an extremely important topic for me and focus leads to a happier life as well. I have read books like Cal Newports Deep Work that only taught about focus. Had read atomic habits during the time to understand more about the habits of focus as well. So what is focus in itself and how do we really understand and get better with our focus. In simple words, focus is simply the art of eliminating your distractions and doing just one thing at a time. When you start doing only one thing at a time, focus naturally comes in.
Now the question is why is focus so important in life?
Improved Productivity: If you think about it, when you focus on one task and only one task, you improve your productivity. For an example, if you are ironing your clothes, then you simply iron your clothes and don't do anything else. You will possibly complete a lot of clothes within an hour or so. If you are reading your newspaper, simply read your news paper and you will learn a lot out of it. So focusing on a single task will definitely improve your productivity.
Clear Thinking: When we focus on one task and one task only, we start thinking a lot more clearly. Why does focus help clarity? Focus means eliminating your distractions, and eliminating distractions means bring clarity to what exactly we need to do. So will bring a lot of clear thinking into your life.
Better time management: When we focus, we can do things faster than our usual time. For an example, 2 hours of focused effort will complete so much work, that possibly we can do it in the entire day. Once we know we will be able to complete within 2 hours, we can better manage our time since the focused work is already done.
Increased Motivation: When you accomplish things faster, you do things well, and you achieve more. When you achieve more, you are able to achieve even more and that increases your motivation.
Enhanced Learning and Memory: Most of the students suffer from focus because they keep on getting distracted by phones, people and just random thoughts that go in their head. However, when you truly focus at the task at hand, there won't be anything more powerful than that for you. You would be able to complete a lot of things, just by the virtue of laser focus and effort.
Paul J Meyer, out here says that productivity is not an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and focused effort. Commitment is a key word. What is commitment? the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc.
That's the google definition to a commitment. One has to be truly and deeply dedicated towards a cause or an activity. Second thing is intelligent planning. One needs to plan what needs to be done when in order to complete the project. Intelligent means have your buffers as well. The third part is focused effort, effort that's focused free of distractions is what focused effort means.
So the definition of success is to be deeply committed towards your purpose or an activity, commitment means waking up in the morning if that's required or sleeping late at night if that's required to complete what needs to be done. That's what commitment means. Do what's necessary to complete it. The second is intelligent planning, we all run after certain things but if we take 10 minutes to plan something we will save a whole day of effort. Nothing can be a huge success if there's no intelligent planning. The third is focused effort, planning without effort is never useful. Once the goal is planned, once we have thought on what we need to do and when, we also need to be flexible in order to achieve the goal. Sometimes we need to change the plan and make course corrections but that's okay as well.
This is even more beautiful. A lot of times people give up on working hard, the idea is to never give up. Never ever ever in the world. Every obstacle is really an opportunity. Let's read this statement again, I learned to focus and work hard and not give up. I learned that every obstacle is really an opportunity. Why is obstacle an opportunity? Because let's say you have an obstacle during your path, what you start doing during that time is not focus on the obstacle but you need to focus on the opportunity. Focus on what you would learn once this obstacle is removed. So that's the idea out here, focus on the opportunities and not the obstacles behind.
Simply focus on your work and life will be good. We say this as Karma Yoga, which means that it working itself is yoga and yoga is therapy. So we should simply ignore the noise and focus on our work. What happened at the marriage, what happened to Donald Trump, what happened to your favourite movie star, everything is noise, and that's how we can recognise the importance of our own work.
Juggling between 2 tasks, multitasking and other forms are simply attention shifting are highly inefficient. Simply, the brain works much faster and more accurately when the attention is focused, for a stretch of time, on one thing at a time. Beautiful, this quote simply teaches us to have our attention focused on one thing at a time while doing something.
Now in what ways can we really focus on a particular task. There are many ways honestly, but one simple way that I use, is I just write down what are the distractions I have currently, then I write solutions to each of those distractions. Once, I have the solutions written, I simply go ahead and implement those solutions. More importantly, I stay in the present and focus on what needs to be done and ignore everything else in the world. That way I can produce high quality work and it contributes towards my success as well.
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