Focusing on Focus
As our devices do more and more of the heavy lifting for our memories, and provide us with everything we could wish for with the click of a few buttons, something is getting diminished in the whirr of technological advances. Our ability to focus.
With so much going on down by our fingertips, it’s easy to think we can pay attention to multiple things at once. Scrolling through pictures while listening to a conference call, while sending a text message we think we’re the kings and queens of productivity.
While you may feel like you’re doing all of those things, you’re not really doing any of them well. Your brain cannot actually multi-task. It can attend to one thing at a time then quickly switch over to the other thing. When you multi-task nothing is getting your complete, undivided focus, so if you want to do anything to the best of your abilities you’ll need to focus on it.
On with focus, off with Internet
That doesn’t mean ten or fifteen minutes of focused productivity followed by twenty minutes of free for all on your devices. It means chunks of dedicated single focus time. One way to do that is to remove the temptation to get into free for all time altogether, like using one of those programs that shuts off your internet for what ever specified amount of time you program it for.
Check out these 9 apps to shut up the Internet and get back to work from PCWorld
Grow a virtual tree
Sometimes you need the Internet to do your job. But that doesn’t mean you also need to constant distractions of your phone. There’s a fun app that will encourage you to keep your hands off your phone and your eyes on task. It’s called “Forest: Stay Focused, Be Present”.
The app plants a tree on your screen. If you touch your phone to do something else, you kill the tree. Each one takes half an hour to grow. The more you use the app the bigger your forest gets.
Engage
Then of course there’s the old school way of focusing your attention and that’s engaging. Whether you’re listening to someone else talk or you’re working all on your own, question what’s going on, find something about it that interests you, take it further than you need to, to get yourself involved.
By involving yourself, you can keep your attention from drifting into unfocused land.