Getting Our Focus on Building Our Focus

In the last 8-10 years, I must have spent innumerable hours on the internet trying to figure out the cause of procrastination and lost productivity for my own tasks simply due to binging on social media and YouTube.

I read many blogs, posts, videos by various celebrities, influencers on this and today, I do have a revelation to make specifically on the “ability to focus”. With greater access to huge amounts of information and specifically the well-made marketing videos that very easily draw our attention on the internet, I have found that our current generation is losing our abilities to “stay focused” for a longer duration of time.

Let me elaborate this a bit with the levels of impact on the way we do things and the ways in which we expect things to happen:

• Different Expectations: Our expectations have changed with people we get in touch with, to give us immediate information or in a very short span of time.
• Less Patience: Our ability to “wait” (and / or being “patient”) with how other people behave or do things for us has reduced to quite an extent.
• Tendency of Making Arbitrary Decisions: Many of us who are hooked-on to internet and its marvels tend to take arbitrary actions and decisions based on whatever ‘half-information’ we can get hold of.
• Faster Decisions Vs Detailed Analysis: We are taking faster decisions, but when it comes to taking decisions based on detailed analysis, many abhor the idea of doing the “extra work” and would rather go with opinions.
• More Number of Task Switching: Many tend to switch across tasks more and more due to the plethora of capabilities of internet (and social media), and then get much more tired at the end of day feeling as if nothing got done.

I have read in so many related blogs, that for an average human being, when switching from one task to another, the ability to shift and get focus on the next task takes almost 20-30 minutes! This is an insane amount of wasted time while switching tasks and hence, we feel drained out of our energies at the end of our day.

When we are building something of importance or analyzing information to take a very important decision, we need a lot of focused effort for extended durations. The time we can spend focusing on one activity is very critical for giving a quality output. Hence, to conclude here –

If we can ‘build a higher level of focus with the longest possible duration’ for ourselves (and our teams), we can be overall far more productive to give the best output possible.

If you are managing a team, the above aspect is of utmost importance for managing project task assignments and making a better plan considering the strengths of your team members.

From my overall experience, I suggest the following to get the highest productivity for your own self and setting the right expectations from your team members.

• Limit Project Assignments: Limit the project assignments for a day (or a week if possible). At best, equal to or less than 2 project assignments is the most preferred. The best approach is to work on a single project throughout the day.
• Limit Task Variations: Limit the ‘type’ of tasks that you or your team member may work on during the day. The more the types, the more you (or others) must switch, and this saps us of valuable mental energies. At best, it is said that you should not work on more than 3 different types of tasks in a day.
• Remove / Reduce Social-Media and Other Distractions: A lot of us tend to binge watch during our in-between times, and this IS a big unknown energy sapper and productivity killer. Find our ways to reduce this to the maximum extent possible. Take this as a challenge for your own self and your team members to get back towards applying ‘extended focus’ and improve overall productivity.
• Prepare and Perform “More Design Time”: Spend extra time on incorporating ‘more design time’ for your overall planning of tasks and expected outcomes. I have seen from my experience that the more dedicated discussions you can have to ‘design’ and ‘work-out solutions’ in a team environment, it provides an added boost for getting the desired output with even much better focus on the tasks to be done. When you plan, you tend to ‘think’. The ‘thinking’ part here helps you visualize various possibilities and gives the much needed ‘motivation’ to keep going for complex endeavours.
• Fall in Love with The Flow when You are “In the Flow”: When you get involved and get focused with your task, you get “in a flow”. This is the magic moment for you to keep going and get as much done as you can. Hence, when you are “in the flow”, fall in love with it and keep going till you get to the end of your task. THIS is what gives you the much-needed invigorating feeling with a sense of accomplishment.
• Just Do It!: Of the so many discussions on the age-old topic of procrastination and productivity killers, the only thing that simply works is – to take action and get started (even if you are dead-bored)! Nothing else is as potent as this one and I have always seen this work like magic.

- Written by Anand Nanavati (SupraDigit Solutions)