3 ways of recovering your mental energy and regaining your focus

Posted on July 25, 2021 by Justin Gerard, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.

1. Manage distraction by elimination.
Do you know what is the most important asset that a marketing and advertising company wants from you?
It’s your Attention! Because if they get your attention from their headings, ads, notification they have an opportunity of selling you something.
I’m not saying that marketing companies are bad or good.
What I’m saying is that we are bombarded by hundreds of notifications, ads, headlines, messages, and newsletters demanding our limited attention in a day.
It’s extremely hard to keep our attention and focus on a particular activity because there is so much distraction.
So how do we remain focused by giving our attention to a person or an activity?

I love the quote from Daniel Goleman “One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.”

We need to learn to manage distraction and not allowing the distraction to manage our attention, focus and productivity. Here is a 3 step process in managing distraction.
i. Identify all distraction in your environment and write it down (Example Phone, laptop notification, people requesting your attention)
ii. Identify possible internal distraction when you are going to have your “Focus time”
iii. Identify possible ways to eliminate the distraction.

2. Be clear on the result you want in the next 45 minutes. (small sub-goals)
Now for this to work you should already have your weekly goals and your daily objective.
Then it would be clear for you to determine what activity you need to focus on in a particular hour to get the result you want.
I call it “Focus Time”. You can have 2 or 3 focus time in a day to allow you to focus on the most important task for the day without any distraction.
Before you execute the Focus time there are 2 requirements.
i) focus only 1 activity for a 45 minutes and
ii) Eliminate distraction for 45 minutes before starting your focus time

Setting a clear goal for an hour will increase your efficiency & productivity tremendously.
Just imagine if you said to yourself, for the next hour
i) I’m just going to do only yoga and nothing else
ii) I’m going to develop a timeplan and review milestones for “Project A”.
Focusing on 1 activity in a 45 minutes block of time will produce better results rather than just randomly going through the day.
Remember, before starting your focus time, eliminate distraction.

3. Take a small break every 45 minutes and move your body.
Now you might ask, why 45 minutes? 2 main reasons.
The first reason is our attention span. There are many research done on how long an average person’s attention span is.
Some research suggests that an adult’s attention span varies between 3 minutes to 45 minutes.

The second reason is fatigue and movement.
Question : would you be able to hold your hands up in the air for 1 hour without rest?
It sounds hard or maybe even seems impossible right? Well, why do we want to do that with our attention span?
We need a break to relax our muscles and regain our focus back.
That’s the reason why 45 minutes is a good start.

What if I can’t finish my activity after 45 minutes?
Well, you have 2 choices: to take a break and come back or go on in the momentum until you deplete out of mental energy.
You will feel that you have depleted your mental energy when you don’t have the ability to think clearly any more.
The most important factor is to take a break and move the body to ensure you are recharged with a high level of oxygen in your body.