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When I started my career as an engineer, I didn’t know how to work. I could be neck-deep in a project and any low-priority email that came into my inbox would break my focus. I had to open it. And if it was a request, I’d do it without delay. At the slightest hint of boredom, I’d go on Amazon, Instagram, or some other mindless distraction to keep my short attention span satisfied.
Not surprisingly, I wasn’t getting anything important done. But as long as I was just doing stuff and getting to everything, I was being “productive”. At least I felt like I was.
Why the hell was I doing this?
Why couldn’t I focus like I did in engineering school?
College was simple and straightforward. My only sources of information were my professor and my textbook, and my only obligations were attending class and doing homework.
My new career flipped the table on me. I was constantly bombarded with requests and tasks. I got crucial information about my projects from multiple sources – meetings, industry codes and best practices, company standards, subject matter experts across the country, and on and on. My mind took the shape of my job – scattered.
But I wasn’t being unproductive because of my lack of experience. Other seasoned coworkers were just as distracted. It was something else. Given the amount of work and responsibilities I had, multitasking was the likely culprit, but the real problem was simply a lack of focus.
How Does Focus Work?
The ability to focus comes down to one thing: energy. It may not seem like it but activities like planning, analyzing, and decision-making all take up energy. Focus is like a gas tank. As you use it up, your ability to make great decisions diminishes.
Your brain works like a muscle. You can train it to get strong, but it gets tired, and it has shortcomings. Lots of them. But deep thinking alone doesn’t deplete focus.
In his fascinating book, Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about an interesting phenomenon called attention residue. When you switch from Task A to Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow. A small portion – a residue – of your attention stays stuck thinking about the original task. Many cognitive studies show that people who shift and switch tasks (AKA multitask) experience high levels of attention residue and the quality of their performance on the next task deteriorates. The worse the residue, the worse the performance.
To switch attention from Task A to Task B also takes lots of energy. If focus works for your brain the way gas works for your car, multitasking is like having the car constantly brake and speed up. It’s a sure-fire way of emptying the tank fast.
But not all tasks are alike. Working on tasks you’re familiar with takes less energy to think through than unfamiliar tasks. This is because your brain adapts. It develops neural connections for new tasks so it doesn’t have to work as hard the next time you do the same thing. Learning to drive a car as an adult is nowhere near as hard as when you first got your license. Because your brain adapted, driving becomes mindless.
The brain’s tendency to conserve energy also partly explains why people spend much more time thinking about problems than solutions. Problems are familiar because they’ve been seen and experienced, so they’re easier to think about. We cannot see or experience solutions. They take intense focus and visualization to develop because they’re hypothetical and made up. You must consider what it will take to implement the solution and any plausible outcomes that may result from it. It’s a trial-and-error exercise that takes much energy for your brain to process.
Why do you think it feels so hard to set goals, learn intricate concepts in math, or master a new language? As you may guess, this energy drain compounds when you multitask with both new and unfamiliar tasks.
Tactics for Using Focus Efficiently
Knowing that switching tasks drains focus faster, we need to implement strategies that effectively use this limited resource. Here are three strategies that I’ve been using for years that have helped my actual (not perceived) productivity significantly grow without the need to work harder or longer.
1. Focus on the ONE thing.
In the turmoil of our obligations, there’s always ONE task of the day that outweighs the others. Sometimes two or three, but rarely more.
Many tasks may seem important because we convince ourselves that they are, or someone else does. Not to mention that way that information comes to us with equal importance and urgency is insanity. We have to look at what genuine progress means for a team or a project, and not just follow impulses. I have a guiding question that I took from Gary Keller’s book, The ONE Thing, that helps me navigate the day:
What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
It’s a brilliant question because it’s simple, it strips away the uncertainty, and it forces you to get laser-focused on what’s important.
To add to this, you don’t just do your ONE thing. You do it first and when your focus and willpower is at its peak – when your tank is full. For me, it’s in the morning. Nine times out of ten, if I miss this crucial window, it doesn’t get done and I move on to unimportant work.
2. Stick to the task until you complete it.
This means not answering emails, phone calls or going on Amazon until the task is done. Schedule that for another time. If there’s a genuine emergency and someone needs to get a hold of you, they will find you, and those instances are rare. Otherwise, it can wait.
I know this sounds ridiculous. I mean, how can somebody work on only one thing until it’s completed and get more done?
It’s simple. When you stop letting yourself get pulled in every direction and focus on the task at hand, you take less time to complete the task. This lets you to get to the next task faster and with more energy because you’ve minimized attention residue. The hardest part is resisting distractions.
This was incredibly difficult for me when I first started. I’d stop mid-way through something at the first miniscule sign of boredom. The mind is always planning escape routes from hard work. But after I got comfortable ignoring everything around me, I noticed I was getting things done way faster, with less fatigue, and with high-quality results. Be like a postage stamp and stick to one thing until you get there.
3. Set a timer.
Not only are we limited in the intensity of our focus, but how long we can sustain it. The gas runs out. Additionally, something must also motivate us to push past discomfort and distractions. Setting a timer on unobstructed focus solves this because it gives us a light at the end of the tunnel. Putting a report together with no time limit isn’t ideal because there’s no incentive to get it done. We’ll take all day, or longer. But when you give yourself twenty-five minutes to complete it, you’re walking on coals. That’s why I use the pomodoro technique.
The pomodoro technique is a focus timer. You work on a task for twenty-five minutes and then take a five-minute break. You repeat this for four cycles and then you take a longer break. I’m using it as I write this! I can see why twenty-five minutes is the sweet spot. When you start, it feels like plenty of time but it’s over before you know it.
This simple timer has saved my butt many times. It keeps me focused on what’s in front of me and it’s helped me better calibrate how long something takes. We’re all terrible at this. Notice how time flies when you’re having fun? Or how time slows down when you’re waiting in a doctor’s office or doing something boring? It’s almost impossible to differentiate ten minutes from thirty minutes. You can find a pomodoro timer app anywhere. I use Focus Keeper on my iPhone and Tomato Timer on my laptop.
To make this strategy effective, it’s important that you take breaks from focus, not distractions. This is a crucial detail noted in Deep Work. When we’re unproductive, we work the other way around – spending lots of time on distractions and then taking a break from them by working.
It’s not that we should never have distractions. They’re necessary to keep a mind healthy. The important thing is that we resist those distractions when it’s time to focus. It’s okay to browse Amazon or eBay. Just schedule time to do that separately from focus time.
Targeted Focus Invites Chaos
This knowledge about focus combined with these strategies will give you extraordinary results. But one last thing to remember is that when you focus on what matters, other things won’t get done. Oscar-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola warns us that “anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.” He’s saying that other things will fall apart as less important projects and tasks won’t get done right away. He’s right.
You can’t get everything done at once with high-quality results. The chaos also doesn’t always happen in reality. It’s mostly in your mind and in the minds of others. People may get on your back about it because that’s how they expect you to operate or they don’t understand what’s on your plate. All of that is okay because you know better. The stakes are too high to spread your focus thin.
When you trust in the process, you’ll get what’s most important done and more because you know that saying yes to everything is also saying no to everything.
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