Simple Tips To Remain Focused

It usually begins with the best of intentions.

Author sits down to work, she thinks perhaps she should check her work email quickly. She then remembers a friend’s birthday and wants to send them a message on Facebook. Then she figures she might as well log onto Twitter and check if she missed any notifications - just for 3 minutes.
Suddenly she realizes that 45 minutes have gone by and she’s sitting comfortable and reading comments on facebook on a viral post by Men’s Humor.

While the internet can be a great source for research and work, it is also an amazing trigger to procrastinate – when you seriously need to buckle down and be productive.

I realize some people are addicted to gambling, others are addicted to drugs, women, fast cars or pranking black people ‘in the hood’ for viral youtube videos. My choice of drug begins with WWW.

I stumbled upon an old article on Simply Zesty that got me a little worried particularly after reading this frightening paragraph:

Technology addictions can lead to increased stress-levels, shorter attention spans (especially in kids), irregular sleep-patterns and poor sleep, to name but a few.

Most worryingly, nobody has done research into the long-term effects of dopamine on the human brain in the age of Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. Rats were investigated in the 60s and again in the 90s, but not so much humans. Simply put, there might be long-term side-effects to dopamine ‘addiction’ that we simply don’t know about yet.

As a productive human being, you need all of the concentration you can get. If you’re not completely focused, you’re not giving the best of you.

So how do you turn off the distractions and stay focused?

At first you will feel lost, but soon you will appreciate how much you will achieve if you follow these tips:

1. Turn off your phone
Yes, turn it off. Don’t set it on vibrate, don’t just lower the volume, shut it down completely. Keep it far away from you so you’re not tempted to turn it back on. You’d be surprised how much good this can do you.

2. Turn off your Internet
I’m guilty of losing focus. I have times where I feel so frustrated, I log on to twitter just to see how many retweets I’ve received that day. But doing this is just the beginning of letting yourself be sucked into the hole that is the Wide World Web.

3. Many workers need to use the internet to get things done, whether the resource in question be Wikipedia or Google, and those pesky social networks are always just a tab away. Currently there are quite a number of softwares/apps available that can help you find a Zen-like focus, instead of pushing you further into distraction. One such software is known as Freedom (for both Mac and Windows).

Just don’t sabotage yourself by blocking social sites from one browser and then launching another browser to get your Facebook fix.



What’s your addiction? Do you have a hard time staying focused? What do you do to keep your concentration? Share in the comments!