How to change your focus on focus

How’s your ability to focus these days? Chances are, it’s not all that great.

The combination of the pandemic, the election, and the world’s general state has pushed our brains into a constantly “on-guard” state. Whether you consciously know it or not, fight or flight has become a way of life, making deep, prolonged focus difficult.

I definitely see and feel it. I see it in my inability to concentrate on any reading or writing that requires deep thought. I feel it as I am quickly distracted by the smallest interruption. Even my favorite focus tactic — setting a timer and concentrating for 30–45 minutes — hasn’t been working.

So I changed the way I focus, and it’s made a massive difference in what I accomplish each day.

Rather than thinking of the quantity of focus time (45 minutes), I’m looking at the quality of what I accomplish, no matter how much time is involved. I’m concentrating on doing things that move the needle on my projects and goals in small increments. I’m not worrying about how much time they take.

If I can make progress in 15 or 20 minutes, I’m happy with that. Each little victory gives me a mental boost and inspires me to keep going. And as a bonus, at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve made progress.

I don’t have to depend on big blocks of focus time to make things happen.

How to make quality-of-time-based focus work for you (even if you don’t have a lot of time — or focus)

At the beginning of the day, take a Post-it Note and write down five small things you would like to accomplish during your day. Ideally, these are things that will improve your job, your business, or your life. More than anything, these are specific things that shouldn’t require a lot of time to complete.

So obviously, you wouldn’t put “write my book” as one of the items on your list. But you might put “outline chapter two” or even “write down three ideas for a book.” These are specific and only require short amounts of dedicated concentration.

When you have a block of time, no matter how short, look at your list and use quality-of-time-based focus to work on an item on your list. Your goal is to complete as many of the items on your list as possible. Working your way through the list will enable you to make progress, no matter how small, on something important to you.

While it may have only been one client call, or only writing for 15 minutes, that’s one more client call than you would have made if you were waiting for a big block of focus time.

All this doesn’t mean you should completely ignore quantity-of-time-based focus; it definitely can help your productivity. But right now, in this focus-challenging environment, we’re all in; long sessions of focus can be hard to get into and use well. Relying on shorter, quality-of-time-based focus sessions gives you the ability to have daily successes when deep focus is hard to find.