3 Tips to Help You Focus and Improve Your Productivity

A person who is good at organizing their time can limit their focus to the tasks they accomplish. Without focus, your pursuit of things becomes useless.

You may succeed in completing some small tasks, complete your work in very small increments, and cross everything off your entire daily to-do list. However, without focus, you are doomed to distraction, wasting time, and becoming unable to stick to your priorities.

Many advanced focus techniques help you complete your tasks no matter the circumstances, but it can actually take months, if not years, of continuous practice to master them, and for most of us, it's not worth it.

Improve your ability to focus

You can improve your ability to focus by following these tips:

1. Rid your surroundings of any distractions

The environment in which you live plays a significant role in your ability to concentrate, but most of us are ignorant of it. Take a deep breath and imagine for a moment that you are chilling on a beach where no one else is. The warm sun caresses your skin and the waves embrace the beach. How do you feel about that?

You feel at peace in your environment and in your ability to focus because you are in a calm state of mind.

We focus better when we're comfortable, with no office machines making noise in the background, no bothersome coworkers, and no phones ringing or emails compelling us to answer them.

You are alone without any distractions and you feel comfortable. This is exactly what you need in your work environment.

All these distractions are present in office environments. Although it aims to bring like-minded people together to achieve a common goal, it is not appropriate for productivity.

Your coworkers won't quite quit trying to catch your attention. To get it back, you have to work twice as hard every time you become distracted.

Staying focused is almost impossible with everything that happens, but there are solutions, like:

1.1. Work from home

Working from home in a comfortable environment is the ideal escape to increase your concentration level, but most of us do not have this option. So, the best solution is to find a quiet and comfortable meeting room available, get away for an hour, get some work done, and return to your office to be available again.

1.2. Using headphones

You can wear headphones and listen to music or even the sound of waves to lessen the chance of outside distractions. Headphones help you focus on only one sound and show others that you are busy and do not want to be interrupted either.

1.3. Not using your phone

If your job allows it, feel free to switch your phone to airplane mode. This will help you forget about it entirely and show that you are not a slave to it.

1.4. Not opening your email

Email notifications are the worst. They don't stop ringing every minute, so close your email entirely if you really need to focus. The goal is to eliminate anything that may distract you from your work and to reach clarity of mind.

2. Rid your body of any distractions

After finding a suitable environment, you should be completely comfortable. The second thing that may hinder your ability to focus is your level of physical comfort.

Do you find yourself fidgeting in your office chair every few minutes, trying to find a comfortable position, or maybe you're hungry? Everything about your body can hinder your ability to focus.

Every time you adjust the way you sit, your stomach hurts, or you have any idea that is not related to the task you are doing, you experience a lapse in concentration, and again, you need to make double the effort to regain your focus.

Before you sit down to work on a project for a long time, do everything you can to make yourself as comfortable as possible. This will contribute significantly to your relaxation and concentration levels.

3. Rid your mind of any distractions:

Your inability to concentrate is caused by the turmoil in your subconscious mind, which you need to clear. Since we have more essential things to do, we frequently put off small activities until the end of the day or during our spare time. But what if you knew that these seemingly basic tasks are actually the key to achieving the highest degree of focus possible?

These small tasks accumulate over time, and this irritates your unconscious mind. You know they must be accomplished, but you refer them to your subconscious mind to think about them later. Then, as you try to focus on a big task that comes to mind to remind you of the need to achieve it, you acknowledge the fact that you postponed it too much and try to accomplish it. At this stage, you lose your focus completely and again, you need to make a double effort to regain your focus.

The solution is to:

• Do any task that takes less than 5 minutes to complete.
• Prioritize the rest of the tasks and complete each task on time.

That will allow you to skip all those small tasks that interrupt your focus and tell your subconscious mind that everything else is less important than the project at hand, thus reducing the chance of distraction.

In conclusion

Learning to focus effectively is a basic need for productivity. Eliminating distractions is a successful solution to raising your level of concentration, and remember to rid your environment, body, and mind of distractions so that focusing on the tasks you do will become much easier.