Become Productive by managing your Focus

 Waqar Ahmed | The Productivity Science

What it’s about? Human has a limited scope of focus. It can only do one thing at a time effectively. The more the focus is distributed on things, the less effective would be the productive results. Neuro-scientifically, it is not suggested for any human to do multi-tasking like browsing more than one topic on Internet as it would only be proven fatal to human attention, and the results won’t be satisfactory. Nothing better is achieved in distributing focus onto so many things at a single time.

Why manage your focus? Focus is what makes our learning effective. When we start prioritizing time management, we often ignore the fact that if time is not well spent by following the proper standard operational procedures, the whole effort would be subsumed as zero. Time management must be coordinated with the management of focus. When we take only one target at a time and give our whole attention to it, the ultimate breakthrough takes place. Whenever you have got some important tasks on your to-do list, and those tasks stand more than a few numbers, try to shortlist the most important tasks, and focus on those tasks only.

Why Time management is not effective? Time management is equally important as does focus management. However, it is also an important fact that the chosen time for brainstorming could be easily manipulated with artificial productivity. It means we open up more than one task at the same time on our laptop, and expect the best results quickly as different tasks are moving parallel. But the end result always takes us into a deep rabbit hole where we don’t easily figure out how we didn’t achieve the expected results. It is because our focus span was scattered to so many places that our neurons couldn’t easily bear the burden of this whole pressure. And nothing effective is being achieved at the end.

How to manage focus? Start with the purging of tasks first. Once you are done selecting the most urgent task from your ‘might to-do’ list, force your entire Neuro-cognitive energy to a single topic. During the process, you would experience the temptation of diverting your attention since you have been stuck to a single topic for so long, and it has become a boring task. But please stick with the same topic until you think; you have done enough work.

Take a short break, and if you think you have done your satisfactory work on the task and want to move on to the next one. Do it! But make sure you are not bringing any unsatisfactory thoughts from the preceding topic that demands you to take a look back into the topic before proceeding with the new topic. It will distract your focus, and you won’t be able to achieve the effective results that you wanted to see for the second task. 

Choose one topic and put all your energy into it. Forget the rest of the world for a while.