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Elevate Your Potential Magazine

Elevate Your Potential Magazine

5 Ways to Increase Your Focus and Minimize Distractions

Sometimes you will get distracted by a thought that disrupts your focus. When this happens, the last thing you want to do is tell it to go away, as this usually doesn’t work. | Image: (Paul David Lozano/Dumb Little Man)

Over the course of a month, I have adopted 5 techniques to help me get rid of – or at least minimize – distractions. And I’ve found that these methods give significant results in a short amount of time.

Increase Your Focus: Did you know that for every distraction, you will have to wait for at least 25 minutes before things return to normal? Yeah, I didn’t know that either. That’s why increasing your focus is vital.

The truth is, distractions are now a part of everyday life. Notifications, email, the Internet, social media, colleagues… these are but a few of the many obstacles we face today. And if you have ever struggled with any of these, you aren’t alone.

Staying Focused – Your Smartphone and Facebook Distractions

For example, Facebook and email bombarded me during my last summer break. I knew I had to work, but the temptation to check each of them was constantly on my mind. Also, I found that during conversations, no matter how engaged I am, whenever my phone would vibrate my focus immediately dropped to zero.

One of the main reasons I got distracted from working was the fact that I used Word for writing. Though I have nothing against Microsoft, Word simply sucks when you want to focus on writing. There are just so many options at the top of my screen that it’s hard to focus on doing the task at hand. That’s why I switched to plain text writing – it’s simple and helps me focus.

Most distractions you get come from the Internet. While using the right software can help a lot, it still helps to go offline for at least an hour each day.   Read the full story…. dumblittleman.com

 

 

Charles Duhigg: Build Mental Models to Enhance Your Focus

According to Pulitzer winner Charles Duhigg, the art of focus is training your mind to know what it can safely ignore. Duhigg’s latest book is “Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business”.

(Charles Duhigg)  Nowadays it’s incredibly hard to stay focused. There’s so many distractions around us at any given moment. Your pocket vibrates at any given moment because you’re getting ten new emails and on social media there’s all these new notifications and the phone is ringing and your kids need help and your colleagues are coming up because you are working in an open office plan and they’re asking you to chime in on some memo.

Maintaining Focus by Building Mental Models

Maintaining focus nowadays is harder than ever before. But it’s way more critical too. One of the things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive companies is that they create ways to enhance their focus. They manage their mind in such a way that they’re able to focus on what’s important and ignore distractions much better. And the way that they do this is by what’s known as building mental models.

Essentially telling themselves stories about what they expect to see, engaging in this kind of inner dialogue about what they think should be happening that allows their brain almost subconsciously to figure out what to pay attention to and what to ignore. One of my favorite examples of this is a big study that was done of nurses in NICUs.

Some researchers from a group named Client Associates went into some hospitals because they wanted to figure out why some nurses were so good at paying attention to the right things whereas others got distracted by all the noise and bustle around them. And what they found is that the best nurses in NICUs which is the neonatal intensive care unit who were handling these babies.

Mental Focus – What Do You Expect to See?

The nurses who were almost had a sixth sense or an ESP about figuring out which babies were sick and were getting sicker were the ones who were constantly telling themselves stories about what they expected to see as they were walking around the hospital. So one of my favorite interviews from this study was with a nurse named Darlene.

And Darlene said that what she would do is that she always was keeping a picture in her brain of what she thought the perfect baby should look like. And so she would walk through the unit and she would notice when babies didn’t kind of match that picture in her brain, right. And they would match – they would mismatch that picture in kind of odd ways.  Source: http://bigthink.com

 

More resources:

About – Charles Duhigg

My name is Charles Duhigg, and I’m a reporter for The New York Times. I’m also the author of The Power of Habit, about the science of habit formation in our …

Charles Duhigg (born 1974) is an American journalist and non-fiction author. He is a reporter for The New York Times and the author of two books on habits and …

Charles Duhigg – Home | Facebook

Charles Duhigg. 26784 likes · 464 talking about this. Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter | New York Times Bestselling author of “The Power of…

Smarter Faster Better – The Transformative Power of Real Productivity

Smarter Faster Better - The Transformative Power of Real Productivity - Charles Duhigg

Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key productivity concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done.

Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently.  Learn more…

 

See also: Self Improvement Solutions | Health & Fitness Store at Elevate Christian Network

 

About 

Cee Harmon is the founder of Elevate Christian Network and Elevate Your Potential Magazine. He enjoys helping people improve the quality of their lives - spirit, soul, and body.
 
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