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Hi Team,

I admit that I have a compulsion to be productive and being distracted aggravates me.

We are all swimming in a sea of distraction, so how can we remain focussed and on task long enough to actually accomplish anything decent?

I recently devoted three Weekly Emails to the importance of our attention and our awareness. In email's # 177 to 179 I outlined that the world is going through a revolution in human behaviour "The Attention Revolution". We are living more and more of our lives "on-line" and our attention is a valuable commodity that major corporations are clambering to harness and control. 

 We live in a world that is quite different to the one we evolved in thousands of years ago. The modern hyper-connected world may not be the best fit for our health and happiness?

Humans have an innate need to stay connected and to know what everyone else is doing, and we now have devices that allow this to happen 24-7.

Let us face it our lives are a distracted mess. How often do you check your emails, or check your social media? How long can you stand by yourself without pulling out your phone? Do you get angry when someone does not respond instantly to your latest message?

"How you do anything is how you do everything. Your character refers to how you handle the day-to-day things in life, no matter how small." Derek Sivers

Being constantly connected to others is a powerful urge, it is addictive. Frequently communicating with people fights off boredom, and most of us are scared of boredom. People also love to gossip, and social media is the ultimate gossip spreader. 

"90% of success is not getting distracted." Shane Parish

Success now belongs to the people who focus on what is in front of them instead of being distracted by everything around them. Everyone gets distracted, so the key to productivity is recognizing your "personal distraction triggers" by being conscious of your weaknesses when you are trying to concentrate. 

Nir Eyal in his book titled "Indistractable", shows that focus is a learnt skill which takes effort and energy to develop and maintain. Eyal outlines that good habits are the foundation for focused productive work, such as taking regular breaks from work to exercise, or good habits around nutrition and sleep. He reinforces that distraction is easy and lazy and prolonged focus is hard, evasive and must be constantly nurtured and reinforced. 

 How to switch from easily distracted to highly focused.

1. Remove distractions, turn off all notifications and deliberately leave your phone in another room.
2. Make tasks as easy as possible, plan out your time/tasks the day before, make the most of your optimal "morning brain" and try the Tim Ferriss productivity mindset of "what would this look like if it were easy?"
3. Cap your to-do-list at 3 tasks max, make your work all about productivity and less about perfection.
4. Excellence is the next 5 minutes, make the next 5 minutes of work the best possible, then repeat.
5. Set small personal targets, and reward yourself for achieving them.
6. Calm the farm, one of the most common triggers of distraction is stress. Calming yourself down before you try to focus on a specific task can make all the difference.
7. Baby steps add up, stay focused on moving forward one step at a time, which is the only way to achieve anything significant.

"FOCUS stands for Follow One Course Until Successful" Kevin Eikenberry

Thanks for reading,
Stay safe and ditch the phone.
David