Distraction-Free
For a long time, I ask myself why I can’t focus on a single thing for 25 or 40 minutes. What prevents me from starting and finishing reasoning without breaking up seeing slack channel messages, stock options prices, or new emails from my inbox?
Sleepy
Is notable how our behavior changes when we are tired and sleepy. We are all the time trying to encourage our brain with some pleasure or some kind of excitement. I don’t even need to say there is only one solution to this problem. Let’s try finishing working hours kicking the can down the road and at the end complain about not being productive as we would like. If we police ourselves to take a better night’s sleep, ok. I know that are N factors about a bad night’s sleep and we need to consider them. So remember to not charge ourselves too much. Take some time and recharge the energy for the next day.
Notifications
How much time do we take to see a new message from slack? How about a new inbox mail or messages on the smartphone? Maybe some second I supposed between the time we see a notification and open the app. Without generalizing, I know that many of us have this bad habit. I’ve been working and studying with notifications off and it worked well. Think that when we have an emergency, we will receive a phone call and not a message or an e-mail. This is for our personal contacts too. Don’t be afraid to turn the notifications off for a period, maybe 25 or 40 minutes. Consider a focus time and give messages, people, or things the attention at the intervals. The Pomodoro method could help a lot to achieve this good habit and de-stress. Turning the notifications off doesn’t mean you need to ignore your team or family. It means that you are giving more value to your focus time, working, studying, and having fun.
Colors
The apps are created to entertain and get our attention. The more time we spend on it, the more profitable it is for the companies. In general, it is created with hot colors to induce our brain to focus on fast, on-time notifications appearing, even at a glance. This gets our focus and attention out instantaneously, drops our logical reasoning and we lost all the context of what we were doing. A good solution for this and for many users is to turn the colors to grayscale on smartphones. It prevents you to be anxious to see all messages with a red balloon on the app icon, or the delivery app promotion message and helps us to focus on what really matters. If you get a try, you will notice that you will be reading messages, articles, and news with more attention and with distraction-free about all these colors stealing your attention. You will stop following things and people on social media understanding that these things were not so relevant to you, just because you gave them more attention to their in some time in the past.
Elements
This is true for the tools that we use at work. Avoiding seeing a lot of elements and texts on the screen helps us to keep the focus on what matters.
Try using more full screen. If two screens make you disperse, try a single one. If the tool that you are using has a lot of elements on the screen, try some configuration with fewer or no elements, maybe another tool. This is one of the motivations that makes me like so much Vim editor.
At least the result is a better focus and attention on what we are doing.
Browser
The browsers hide the biggest problem of our generation. A lot of dispersing on searching and consuming information. Again the colors and elements are relevant factors here, but the “easily” factor of finding some information is too.
We know that our brain is programmed to pay attention to things that are rare or unique. So if the information is spread across ten or thousands of pages on a search result, we tend to move between a lot of these, fast looking for keywords that are more interested in our research until we find a lot of information that matches the answer that we expect. We forget all the rest presuming that those are not so relevant. In this situation, we probably lose a lot of gold content on the internet.
To preserve good content, we could follow the right people about the topic that we are looking for. Try to find some mentors on an interesting area or topic and start following. We rely on them and we know that we could learn a lot from the content they publish.
Conclusion
Humankind can not process two things simultaneously, even if someone says that can do it, they can’t. Maybe something asynchronously hides what is made not so satisfactorily. Focus, on the world today, is a hard skill and so we need to care about it with simple tips that make all the difference the day by day.