Fighting For Focus: Battle Update

Wins, Losses, and Lessons Learned

It’s been a month since I started my mission to regain my focus by battling against all of the forces that are vying for my attention. I decided to write this update to check in on my progress, hold myself accountable to the promises I made, and figure out where I need to make adjustments.

Overall, I am certainly much more aware of when I am losing my focus or am about to be distracted which is a great first step. But, I am also finding it’s much harder to practice each of these tactics consistently than I had imagined.

Limit Multitasking

I find that I try to multitask more than I thought I did. So, when I catch myself trying to do two mindful things at the same time I now make myself pick one. For example, when I am watching a TV show and start reaching out for my phone, I now stop and force myself to deliberately choose which one is the priority. So far, the show always wins.

Use the Pomodoro Technique

This technique is working really well for me. I have given myself 20 focused minutes to write this blog post and having the time blocked off gives me the “freedom” to not get distracted by other things. However, I’m not using this technique often enough so I’m challenging myself to set aside more time for focused work.

Stop the Dings and Pings

I had already turned off all of the alerts and notifications and set my Do Not Disturb times on my phone. But I recently downloaded the Substack app on my phone and all of the alerts were on by default. Obviously, I found myself checking the app every time there was a new unread message. They are now turned off and I need to remember to do this for all the new apps I download.

Establish No-Phone Zones

This is a bit tangential to the goal but related to limiting phone time. I realized that when my phone is close at hand, I have a tendency to pick it up for no real reason. Maybe just to check it or if I’m seemingly bored. So, I am now trying to only pick it up if I have a specific task to do. This change alone has cut down my phone time by 25%!

Doodle

Doodling has always helped me focus during meetings but I realized that during virtual meetings, when I’m doodling I’m looking down and not at the screen or the camera so now I’m a bit concerned it looks like I’m not actually paying attention or it may seem like I’m doing something else. More to come on this one.

Flex Your Focus Muscle

I read 5 books in January with focused reading spurts of at least 30 minutes but mostly for about an hour each day. They were all really good books so the time just flew by. My longest focused feat was watching the movie F1 uninterrupted with a runtime of 2 hours and 35 minutes!

Please share any tips you are using to build your focus muscle or any enlightening discoveries you may have uncovered.