Focusing without Distraction

Cal Newport has a new book out titled Digital Minimalism. This book follows up on his previous book titled Deep Work. Both explore the concept that he calls “deep work” that is often referred to as “monotasking” by researchers and scholars. If you’re unfamiliar with Newport’s work, he’s a computer science professor at Georgetown and a “study hacks” expert with several terrific books to his credit.

There’s a great interview with Newport in a recent New York Times article by the NY Times Smarter Living columnist Tim Herrera. The interview gives a good summary of Newport’s concept of how to best focus in the digital age when we’re constantly bombarded and distracted by digital clutter in our lives. Well worth checking out the interview.

Intense focus is often the key difference between achieving success and accepting failure when working on complex tasks, learning challenging information, and learning or improving new skills. I can’t say enough about the importance of finding focusing strategies that work successfully for you. I’ve got many focusing strategies in these blog posts, and please send me your favorites.

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Make More Time: Use Down Time

There are many times a day when a few “dead” minutes occur. This “down time” exists in everyone’s day, even yours! Yes, I know you’re busy. And, I also know that you have several times a day when you’re not actually focused on anything important and could use that down time – even if it’s just a minute or two – to think about or engage in an activity that you want to do but don’t ever seem to have time to do.

Don’t think you have any down time? Here are a few activities in the day that might work for you to to turn down time into time to get something useful done:

  • Brushing your teeth
  • Standing in line
  • Pumping gas
  • Watching the microwave
  • Waiting for a spouse/roommate before you both leave the house
  • Walking

Get the idea? It’s fun to find these times in your day. Make a game out of it.

Give this strategy a try for a few days. At a certain point, it will feel natural, even habitual. You’ll wonder why you never noticed how much extra time you have available for doing something that really matters to you. waiting to leave the house, standing in line, pumping gas, watching the microwave. Go over that rhythm, interval, phrase, or whatever has been bothering you.

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Increase Your Focus: Have No More than Three Goals

Here’s a sure way to remain unfocused and get nothing done: Have 10 or 12 goals when you sit down to concentrate on something. Whether you’re learning some information or working on a physical skill, that’s just too many things to keep track of and you’re sure to fail.

If you want to stay focused, get some work done, and accomplish what you’ve set out to do, you’ve got to limit the number of goals you have at any one time. Three is the maximum. Sometimes, one is the best!

“I can handle more than that,” you protest. Yes, you probably can. Over the course of a day you can accomplish more than three things. That’s true.

However, while you’re truly focused in on something, you’re only doing one thing at a time. As you switch among these items, you can’t have 10 things to do. To stay focused, limit what you’re trying to accomplish.

Choose one, two, or three goals for your next focused activity. You’ll appreciate how much of a burden has been lifted by not trying to focus on too many things at once.

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Presenting to Senior Executives

Many talented, driven, smart executives give great presentations to their peers, direct reports, and colleagues in their field. Then, when it comes time to present to senior leaders at their organization, they freeze up, they ramble, they lose confidence. There’s something about going up the chain of command that make these presenters become unglued.

I have several ideas as to why this happens, and it’s a topic I discuss with my performance coaching clients often.

If you’re looking for some strategies to help you be a better presenter to senior executives, take a look at this article in the Harvard Business Review by presentation coach and author Nancy Duarte. (Duarte is most well-known for creating the presentation for Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth.”)

Duarte’s strategies are essential ones. I especially like the last one: Rehearse. Rehearsals and over-the-top preparation are key if you want to succeed in high-stress environments.

In some future blog posts, I’ll be discussing what’s missing from Duarte’s list: the emotional and mental preparation needed to keep your composure so you can be your best self in high-stakes environments. That inner preparation is every bit as crucial as the presentation itself.

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Forgetting May Be the Default Mode of the Brain

Most of us think our brains are designed to remember things. We pay attention to some information, we focus on an activity, and our brains store information in long-term memory so we can retrieve that information or those skills when we need them in the future.

What if we’re wrong? It might be that our brains are designed to forget things and that putting something into retrievable, long-term memory is special and rare.

If that’s the case, everyone needs to up their game when they want to assure that a piece of information or a specialized skill gets into long-term memory.

I’m fascinated with this idea, and I’ll explore it regularly on this blog.

Here’s an interesting article at QuantaMagazine on brain mechanisms that work against remembering. It’s a fascinating introduction to this topic. Check it out.

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Consider Your Audience – Macy’s

From an email from Macy’s spokesperson Emily Goldberg, quoted in an online story at SFGate.com on Macy’s closing a northern California store:

“Macy’s, Inc. has been reviewing its real estate portfolio across the country to see if there are opportunities to improve the use of our assets. As previously announced, Macy’s has decided to close its Sunnyvale, California store in early 2019.”

Really? This is what Macy’s leadership team wants quoted in a newspaper? It’s not in an article in the business press. it’s on a website widely read by regular people, many of whom are Macy’s customers.

Here’s the issue: This quote sounds like it is intended as part of a conversation between Macy’s and potential investors who may save Macy’s from bankruptcy. Talking about “use of assets” and “real estate portfolio” is fine when discussing financial details with a private equity fund manager or other investor.

It’s also fine for an operations director when making a report to their COO or CFO.

But, in a newspaper? When you’re announcing the closing of a brick-and-mortar store that employs a bunch of people and where parents take their children?

This quote just sends the wrong message to the general public – the actual people who will be reading an online newspaper article.

Here’s what these actual people want to hear from a Macy’s spokesperson:

  • We’re saddened when we have to close any Macy’s store. We know this affects our employees and our customers.
  • We’re trying to figure out the best way to serve our customers and stay in business.
  • We’re truly sorry for this inconvenience and hope our loyal customers will visit nearby Macy’s.

Hey, Macy’s: Your customers do NOT think of one of your stores as a real estate asset. It’s a place to buy a prom dress, a new pair of shoes for church, some perfume for Valentine’s Day.

My suggestion to spokespeople for all retail companies: Talk to the media like you’re talking to your most valuable customer, not like you’re presenting to a hedge fund.

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Increase Your Focus: Have an Ending Time

Want to increase your focus? Always have an ending time for your activity.

An ending time serves as a mini-deadline, and deadlines have a way of making us focus a lot more intently than we usually do. Plan your ending time before you start the activity.

Here’s the great thing: It doesn’t matter if your ending time is 10 minutes from now or 2 hours away. The length of time you work is up to you. Just make sure you know how much time you’ll have before you start. You’ll get a lot more done and be more focused if your time isn’t open-ended.

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Make More Time: Schedule an Appointment with Yourself

Once you are using a calendar to write down the important activities in your life, you may quickly discover something interesting:

While every mandatory activity is on your calendar (work, meetings, doctor and dental appointments, times to drive your children to activities) and every social activity is on your calendar (vacations, volunteer work, birthday parties, holidays, and other social engagements), the one activity you most want to get done is not on your calendar!

Day after day it gets skipped, neglected, avoided. “Oh, I don’t have time for that,” you tell yourself. I need to make more time in the day to fit that in.

This is nonsense. You do have time. Just treat this activity like every other important activity in your life and schedule it like it’s a mandatory appointment that absolutely cannot be missed.

That’s right. Schedule an appointment with yourself. Find a spot every day on your calendar for that one thing you always want to do but don’t have time to do.

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Exercising Throughout the Day

My Ten Minute Virtuoso philosophy is simple:

Most of us, most of the time, will move toward our goals faster by doing small amounts of work on a regular basis. It’s more efficient and more effective to get a small amount of work done daily instead of trying to cram all your work into a single, all-day effort once a week or once a month.

Turns out that even exercise research is telling people to do small amounts of exercise every day for the biggest positive effect. Even doing extremely small tasks, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, can have a significant impact on your overall fitness.

Maria Godoy, a senior editor on NPR’s science/health/food team, has a terrific story on learning to love exercise by reframing how she thought about exercise itself. By starting with baby steps, she built up to the fitness fanatic she’s become.

I think you’ll find her approach helpful for just about any goal you have:

  • exercise and diet
  • personal finances
  • learning a language
  • building new habits

I encourage you to give the Ten Minute Virtuoso approach a try. Do a small amount toward your goal each and every day. Over time, you’ll get hooked and you’ll want to take action daily!

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Increase Your Focus: Restart

Even though research shows that people can’t focus intently on an activity for more than 17 – 20 minutes at a time, this research also shows that you can re-start what you’re doing and give your brain the chance to focus clearly again.

You can choose to repeatedly re-focus on the same thing, over and over.

Here’s how it works:

1. Focus on the activity for a short amount of time (10 to 15 minutes max).
2. Either take a short break or focus on something else for a minute or two.
3. Re-start your main activity.

This will effectively start the clock over for your brain.

This strategy comes with a warning: If you switch to something else for a minute to re-start the Focus Clock, make sure that “something else” isn’t email, texts, or other things that will distract you and get you thinking about a whole lot of other responsibilities in your life!

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