How To Improve Your Focus, Limit Distractions And Get Sh!t Done

Posted on March 01, 2016 by Jeff Boss, One of Thousands of Team Coaches on Noomii.

We all want to do more in less time. Get “there” faster, wherever “there” may be. Work more efficiently (and effectively, too). Accomplish more by the end of the day so we can go home, put up our feet and have a tasty (assumedly) alcoholic beverage. Right?

The only problem is, the more we tackle the more there is to tackle. Meaning, that the workloads we face every day never stop evolving.

To make matters more challenging, when you stir in the human components of judgment, social acceptance, political correctness and the tendency to say “yes!” so you stay on people’s “good sides” and not hurt anyone’s feelings, that end-of-day drink is starting to look REALLY good around noon-ish — THAT’S a problem.

The good news is, you can manage the incessant demands and distractions that pile up outside your office door like a zombie apocalypse tirade using two simple techniques described below:

Effective vs. Ineffective Thinking
Our thoughts form the basis upon which everything else (i.e. emotions and subsequent behavior) is built. So to the extent that you take greater responsibility for your own thoughts and subsequent actions, the more sense of control you’ll feel despite the overabundant work load.

There are 2 principles of effective thinking:

Choose your focus. In other words, focus on what you choose to focus on. This means prioritizing the overabundance of irrelevant distractions that can wait to be dealt with later and focusing on the now — the moment — what’ s important about it and why. Of course, some “office fires” that arise do need immediate attention. That’s fine, it happens. The internal conflicts arise when we have competing tasks demanding our focus and we try to deal with two fires at the same time. The fact is, we can’t — or at least not well (this is the ineffective part). Imagine yourself in between two raging fires. You go to dump water on the fire to your left but when you do, the fire on the right incinerates even more. Then, when you go to put out the fire on the right, the fire on the left inflames. It’s a constant cycle of chaos that looks a lot like your dog (or your neighbor’s dog) chasing it’s tail — you’re moving around a lot and it feels like you’re making progress, but you’re not actually moving forward. This cycle will keep spinning unless you choose which fire to focus on and make it go away.
This is what it means to focus on the moment, and doing so serves two benefits:

It builds the capacity to focus
It builds greater self-confidence
Focus, like willpower, is a muscle, and like all other muscles, if it doesn’t get exercised or challenged then it won’t A) maintain its strength or B) grow to become stronger.

2. Choose your distraction. Along similar lines, to think effectively you need to not only choose what to focus on, but choose what distractions to eliminate so you can continue focusing on your target of choice. This is another way of saying that, when distractions arise, you need to pilfer through them smartly. Three ways to respond to distractions are:

- Decide to act on it now
- Defer to a colleague for advice, input, update OR put it aside to deal with at another time
- Delegate to a direct report or other SME

The fact is we all have a million things vying for pole position. If everything is urgent and important then nothing is. This is the same as the adage that if everybody is responsible, then nobody is. Choose what’s important for the moment and act on it.