Small Things That Can Disrupt Your Focus

Having your focus disrupted can interfere with your creative process as well as make you lose productivity. While you might immediately think about all the big things that can do this, such as people interrupting you or your phone ringing, more often than not, it’s the small things that end up stealing your focus.

If you’re trying to work in a room that’s too cold, this can be a culprit because your body is forced to use more energy to keep you warm. If you feel chilled or reach the point of shivering, it means your body is using energy.

In order to focus more, keep the room where you’re working a comfortable temperature. Noise can be a problem for some people. You might hear other people talking, the noise of kids at play if you work from home or dozens of other sounds and this might bother you.

While there are people who can’t stand to have noise when they’re working, silence can be a distraction as well. You need to figure out which sound it is that helps you to focus.

You might have to choose a few options to see which sounds work best for you if silence is a distraction.

One of these is a coffeehouse background noise. This is the quiet sound of dozens of conversations taking place in the background. You can often hear trays being set down, silverware clinking and soft laughter.

This kind of noise deals with silence but at the same time remains in the background so it doesn’t disrupt your creative flow. Some people use white noise. White noise is the same continual sound at a specific intensity level.

What this frequency does is it hides the other sounds that would disturb you. The brain tunes in to the white noise sound and blocks other disruptive noises. Video game music is another option.

This kind of music raises your focus because it stimulates the brain. If you listen to a recording that features several different kinds of video game music, it also works to prevent sound boredom.

The lighting in the room you’re working in needs to be right. Otherwise, it can cause eye strain. You want to make sure that the lighting you use doesn’t make you drowsy. For example, fluorescent lights can bother your circadian rhythm and make you sleepy during the day.

What you eat or drink can have an impact on your focus too. Foods and beverages that are high in calorie or salt content can make you feel drowsy and give you brain fog. Too much salt interferes with the amount of blood flow the brain receives, and steals focus.

If you want to boost creativity and focus, think about your décor. It’s a fact that certain colors have been known to help with both. Green is known to boost concentration. The color red stimulates the mind. Yellow is known to boost creativity and blue is known to help with alertness.

Use Brain Training Exercises to Increase Your Focus

Many people don’t realize that one of the most important parts of your body that needs strength-training is your brain. Just like how you strengthen your arms by lifting weights, you have to do the same with your brain.

If you don’t, you can end up having poor focus and concentration. This can make your mind wander consistently throughout the day, and the end result is that you suddenly realize you haven’t accomplished everything you needed to do.

Several studies have been conducted to prove that brain training exercises and games can increase your focus and strengthen your cognitive functions. These cognitive functions in the brain are what allow you to receive, store, develop, and remember information.

Without strengthening these functions, you can have trouble focusing and concentrating because your information feels scattered rather than organized. One study in Saudi Arabia followed fifty-one healthy subjects for months while they used brain training exercises.

At the end of the study, it was found that several of the test subjects showed improvement in their cognitive functions, especially with their attention span. This means the people who used brain training exercises were able to keep attention and focus on things longer than before they’d practiced the exercises.

One of the most important things you need to train your brain to do is focus. It’s natural to daydream when you’re in an office or doing repetitive work. But you can train your brain to make focusing a habit as well.

When you don’t train your brain to focus on your work, then you can end up with the problem of not getting your to-do lists finished which means you could miss work deadlines.

Some people who don’t train their brains with exercises might have a problem with procrastination. There are several brain training exercises you can use to increase your focus so that this isn’t an issue for you.

However, remember to start at a low level. Just like how you wouldn’t start exercising by bench-pressing three hundred pounds or running five miles, you have to stretch your brain first before it can start focusing properly.

A great thing about brain training techniques is that you can do them anywhere. For example, there are several apps, including the highly popular Luminosity, that allows you to do brain training exercises and games on the go.

By training your brain every day, you’re building it up to handle more. This will help in all areas of life, but especially with work and creativity. When you have a busy day ahead, it can be difficult to remember everything that needs to be done.

But if your mind is already prepared from brain training exercises, you’ll find it easier to remember the tasks you need to get done, and by improving your focus, you’ll boost your productivity.

Don’t Use Your Work Space for Other Things

There’s a reason that the IRS says if you have a home office it should be used solely for that purpose and nothing else. It’s because using a home office for multiple purposes can lead to a crossover between professional and personal use.

If you have a workspace, you should be working. Mixing up the space can happen anywhere that you’ve set aside to work. It happens when you let boundaries slide. But it really is best just to use it for the intended purpose and not for any other reason that people commonly choose to do.

For example, some people choose to eat at their desk or whatever their workspace is. This is a bad idea - not just for health reasons, but it’s also bad for productive purposes. You get less done physically and mentally.

When you mix work with eating or any other habit, it blurs the lines between what’s work and what isn’t. You can easily make the mistake of setting yourself up to think that it’s okay to work and it’s okay to not work when you’re in your space.

At your desk, your purpose should be to focus and to be productive to work on whatever task or project is before you. But when you choose to eat or to do something else instead, it steals that focus and productivity.

This happens because the brain is straddling two functions when you do that. You need to have boundaries between personal tasks and professional ones. Otherwise, your brain remains in the work mode and doesn’t relax and get a break from the work.

This can lead to overwhelm, which in turn can lead to brain fog. On the other hand, if you’re constantly using the space for other things in addition to work, the brain won’t want to get into work mode.

It’s important to establish what your workspace is for and what it’s not for. Your space isn’t supposed to be a spot to hang out and watch TV. It’s not meant to be the area where you play with your pets or your kids.

It’s not supposed to be the place where you play games or wonder what you’re going to have to eat for dinner. When you treat your workspace like any other space, you lose the benefit of conditioning the mind to fall into the habit of work recognition.

You can establish the work habit to create a routine in the mind. As soon as you sit down in your chair, your brain automatically kicks into thinking, “It’s time to work now,” but if you use the space for other purposes, it won’t do that for you. Save the relaxing activities and tasks not related to work for other spaces. You’ll get more done.

Carve Out Time to Gain Perspective and Strategize

Lining everything up and getting it done isn’t something that as easy as it sounds because the full speed ahead method doesn’t usually work on a project. You might be someone who likes to choose your project, write out all the steps, then try to plow through from start to finish.

While that sounds great in theory, you can miss things along the way. Or, you can end up not doing the best job that you could have done with a system check in place. When you’re working on a project, you need to pause to make sure you have the right perspective.

By strategizing, you can make your project have the best possible outcome. When you’re working on something, take the time to think carefully about what you’re doing. Look at what you’ve done so far.

Check to see how what you’ve worked on lines up with the goals you’ve set. This will allow you to see if anything is veering off track. It’s better to catch that periodically throughout working on the project rather than reaching the end and find that you’ve missed a lot of important steps or completely missed your goal.

Look at the work that you’ve done so far. Study it to see how you’ve performed. This can show you if you’re struggling in any part of the project. It can also allow you to check to see if what you’ve done so far meets your expectations.

Or, see if it meets consumer expectations. Creating anything is a two-fold step of having the vision in your mind, then bringing it to life. What can happen is that what you see in your vision can be totally different once you start working on it because you might find that you’ve inadvertently gone in a different direction.

While this might not be a bad direction, if it doesn’t line up with your vision, then it’s not in line with your goals and you have to steer things back onto the right track. When you take the time to gain perspective, this can help you see if improvements need to be made at specific points.

For example, when working on something, give yourself check-in points at certain places in the work. Some people check in at the third of the way mark while others check the work or results when they’re halfway done.

By having a strategy in place to check your work, you’ll be able to tweak what’s not working or to make improvements on what is working. When you pause to gain perspective, this can help to give you new strength for working on the project.

It can also allow you to make sure all of your goals line up. Or, if a goal you’ve previously set needs to be changed or brought back into focus, you’ll be able to make a change at that time.  

Consider the Pomodoro Technique for Increased Focus and Creativity

If you have trouble allowing little distractions to pull you away from your work several times a day, the Pomodoro Technique might be a great fit for you. This is a great time management method.

This technique is also great for those who have work that could take an unlimited amount of time like if you were writing a book. The Pomodoro Technique has four basic steps.

The first step is to simply pick a task from your to-do list. The second step is to set a timer for twenty-five minutes and you would only work on that task for the allotted amount of time.

This means you wouldn’t pause to check social media or have any distractions open in the background. It also means that you wouldn’t switch to a task that you find easier or feel more urgent.

Once your twenty-five minutes are up, the next step in the method is to take a five-minute break. After the break, you would then choose a new task, or return to your first task if it wasn’t complete and work for another twenty-five minutes.

Each task is referred to as your pomodoro. Once you’ve done four pomodoros, or after four of your twenty-fine minute sessions, the final step is to take a break that is at least fifteen minutes long.

This final break shouldn’t exceed thirty minutes. This technique has become so popular because it helps you break down complex projects into ones with manageable amounts of time.

It can be hard to doing research for five hours, but it becomes easier when you do it in twenty-five-minute sprints. You can also put more than one pomodoro in a session. So for example, if you have some simpler tasks like folding laundry or paying the doctor bill you can put them together in one session.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can cross things off your to-do list when you use this technique. If you’re in the middle of a pomodoro and you remember you need to do something else, don’t stop.

Simply write the forgotten task down and continue working. For this technique to work, it’s important that you don’t stop during the middle of one. Some interruptions—such as needing to pick kids up—are unavoidable.

If this happens during one of your pomodoros, simply take that time as your break, and start a new pomodoro after the interruption is over. You may find it useful to plan your pomodoros in advance to head off interruptions.

Divide your blocks of time into sections and write next to these sections what you’re going to accomplish during your pomodoro. You can also write down how many pomodoros you think it will take you, or how many you would like it to take you and then strive to reach that goal.

It’s important when planning your pomodoros not to assign yourself so much that you can’t cross everything off the list. This will leave you feeling like you failed or that it didn’t work at the end of the day. Start with the more pressing and urgent tasks, and if you have more time, then work on the smaller things.

A Proven Way to Boost Your Creativity and Focus

You might be a creative who wants to find more ways to up your productivity and your focus. But if you’re like most creatives, focus might not be your strength. You’re not alone in thinking that way.

Most creatives don’t think in concrete, specific terms when it comes to business things. That’s because the business side feels removed from the creative side. So what you need to do is tap into the creative side to boost the business side.

There is a proven way that you can boost your creativity to get more accomplished and be able to reach your goals. You have to get specific with your thoughts. Sort of having an idea of what you want, or need isn’t going to work.

It’s only when something is specific that you can identify it and work on accomplishing it.

Once you’ve narrowed down what it is you’re after, add a time constraint. For example, if money is what you need, you wouldn’t spend time saying, “Think about where or how I can get more money.”

Instead, you’d say, “What are 5 business models I can put into effect within 10 minutes?” This helps you to develop concrete ways to help take your creativity to the next level.

By having a specific goal with your thoughts, you’ll come up with ideas to improve whatever it is that you need. This step of coming up with ideas within a certain time limit keeps you from wasting time, but it also works for creatives because they don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking of the business side, which can drain creativity.

The ideas that you come up with by adding time constraints can also be put into play faster than if you were vague and spent hours or days trying to come up with a solution.

With your business, you’ll need to learn the best way to market it.

You might have gone back and forth trying to come up with ways that you could do this, but you weren’t able to pin anything down. Rather than spending a lot of effort thinking about this step, you could say that you were going to make a list of the pros and cons of a certain kind of advertising within 15 minutes.

By giving yourself that time limit, you turn into a game and this can produce quicker results and give you ideas for solutions. Plus, when you’re specific about what you want and you introduce that time limit, it boosts your creativity because your focus is intentional rather than running in different directions. It does this because it’s easier for the mind to focus for shorter periods of time versus thinking that you have several hours or days to come up with something.

How to Bounce Back From Past Failures

It is not good enough to know the benefits of starting over and banishing the past. You also have to know how to go about starting the new journey. Many people desire to let go of the past and focus on the present. However, many fail because they lack the skills and information to do it right. This chapter will empower you with the knowledge and skills you need to start this new journey.

Treat The Past As A Lesson

According to psychologists, intelligence is the ability to learn from experience to make better decisions in the future. Therefore, whoever does not learn from the mistakes of the past cannot be referred to as an intelligent person. You should be able to draw out lessons from your experience to improve your decision-making. For example, if you have been in an abusive relationship before, you should remember those factors that made you surrender yourself to a dictator.

If it was because you depended on him or her for sustenance, then you should not enter another relationship until you have a job. You need to empower yourself and be valuable by making your own money. In the same way, if it was because you had low self-esteem, you need to work on that before entering a new relationship. You should be learning from what has happened to you in the past to avoid making the same mistakes...

It’s not likely that you commit to something when you are not sure about what you stand to gain by doing it. Forgetting about the past to start over has numerous benefits. This chapter will explore some of them to give you the impetus to start making changes that will give you a new lease of life.

High Self-Esteem

Your self-esteem is a product of the way you see yourself. It will be low when you feel that you don’t deserve to be loved and treasured. Note that you cannot separate self-esteem from self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the level of confidence you have in your ability to succeed in a task before you attempt it. It is vital that you have high self-efficacy because it makes others trust you to handle their projects on their behalf.

You need to earn the trust of people before you can be given the opportunity to prove yourself. Meanwhile, the only way you can convince them that you can do the job is when you have confidence in your ability to get the job done. Even when you have the qualifications for a job, you’ll still be doubted when you sound unsure about your chance of success in the task...

You’ll be stuck in the past when you think it has a vital role to play in your chances of future success. However, it’s not true that you cannot thrive again because of your mistakes and past failures. The future promises a lot if only you are willing to let go of the past. This chapter examines why the past doesn’t define the future of an individual.

The Past is a Closed Chapter

Treat your life like a book. Your experiences are previous chapters. The present moment is the chapter you are reading. In most cases, you don’t go back to a chapter you have read. You only flip back to those pages when you have something you didn’t get correctly. In some cases, you also flip back to that chapter when you find a similar concept in the current chapter. The implication of this is that you should only remember your past when you need to draw lessons from it.

You will not make progress if you remain stuck in a chapter of a book and refuse to read on. In fact, you might find better explanations regarding a particular concept you find difficult to understand in the subsequent chapters. Life is like that. Sometimes, you will not understand why some things happened the way they did until you forge ahead. For example, you might find out why your former boss treated you wrongly later. It could have been because of a jealous colleague....

When you have refused to start over, you are endangering yourself in various ways. As earlier mentioned, it can make you lose sight of the opportunities around you. This chapter explores what you stand to lose when you’re stuck in the past.

Depression

According to the World Health Organization, depression is a leading psychological problem affecting millions of people around the world. Note that depression is different from the occasional mood swings we have because of an unpleasant event. Depression is more intense and persistent than that. When you are depressed, you will not want to talk to anyone. You will prefer to stay on your bed rather than go out to have social interactions. At that moment, everything in the world becomes colorless and tasteless to you.

Note that depression can become fatal in the long run. It can lead to suicidal ideation. In other words, depression can make you feel like taking your life. Meanwhile, you should never get to that point. There is nothing worth it in this world that should make you feel that taking your life is the best option. As long as you are still alive, you can still rewrite your story. No one is denying that you are hurt, but you cannot get stuck in the past. The price can be too costly. ..