10 Proven Ways To Master Your Focus
Your focus is your most valuable asset, right alongside your private data. That's why billions of dollars are spent every year to make you lose track of time. The whole goal of every social platform is to grab your attention and keep it. Well, in this process, your attention energy gets depleted extremely fast, and that's why you just can't seem to focus on anything important.
Well, in this video, we're going over a couple of techniques that we personally use to control and master our focus levels. Welcome to Alux.
Number one: Build an imaginary wall around yourself or even a physical one, if possible. Going alone into a room to focus is the oldest trick in the book because it pretty much works for everyone. But that's not always a possibility; so the next best thing is to build an imaginary room. You have to respect the thing that you're doing and protect it from outside interference. You are important, and what you're doing is important, and those who neglect that need to take a walk.
People may call you arrogant and self-important, but guess what? At the end of the day, you're the one getting things done. Sooner or later, they'll realize you're actually on to something. Plus, you don't have to do it forever; just for a few hours.
Number two: Go into mental airplane mode. There are hundreds of productivity and focus apps out there, but just one to rule them all, and it comes pre-installed on your phone. It's called airplane mode. It does one simple thing: makes you go off the grid. No notification can buzz through; you are all alone.
Now, imagine you're doing the same thing for your mind. Imagine you've got a toggle switch on and off; an airplane mode is activated. Instead of notifications, there are random thoughts that make you pay attention to them. Well, hit the airplane mode switch and mind your business.
Number three: Make yourself unavailable. The harder it is for people to get a hold of you, the easier it is to focus on what's actually important. Those around you may have the best intentions when showing you the eighth Instagram story with a happy dog dancing, but don't let them. Make yourself as hard to reach as you can.
Go to a place, both physically and mentally, where not even a courier pigeon could track you down. If you make yourself always available, you're basically inviting people in to bother you. If you want to master your focus, most of your time should be spent offline, in every sense of the word.
Number four: Listen to music without lyrics. It's been proven in multiple studies that listening to music, particularly music that you like, improves your focus. You may have heard of the Mozart effect, where a study in students who listened to Mozart scored better on their tests than those who didn't. Music affects your mood and also anchors your mind, so it doesn't wander around quite as easily.
As an extra tip, there's plenty of playlists, both here on YouTube and on Spotify, designed just for this purpose. Also, I don't know if we could ever forgive YouTube for taking down LOFi girl.
Number five: Find your own personal rhythm. Everybody has a different speed of thought and action; find your own and stick to it. A great way to find your rhythm is to start working extremely slowly, as slow as you can without looking ridiculous. You'll find that time seems to slow down too; your anxiety levels drop, and your focus increases drastically.
You may find it hard to focus in a time crunch when you carry a lot of pressure on your shoulders. You may feel like you need to move as fast as possible to get it done, but that's when you need to slow down. Look, you're not Atlas holding the world on your shoulders, okay?
Number six: Leverage the early hours of the day. You hit your peak attention levels usually around 11:00 a.m. The early hours of the morning are the best ones to train your focus, and that's also the most common time when people are depleted on mindless social media scrolling. If you have the luxury of being in control of how you delegate your work time, use as much of it in the morning as possible.
Now, it's also worth mentioning you should respect your circadian rhythm too. Some people feel awake at different hours of the day, and about 30% of the population are considered night owls. Find out what your early hours of the day are and use them properly.
Number seven: Keep it shorter than 3 hours per session. Realistically, you can't focus for more than 3 hours at a time; even that might be a bit of a stretch. Your brain just isn't built for that type of intense activity for sustained hours. Nobody actually works the entire 9 to 5; research shows the majority of people on the 9 to 5 schedule work for about 3 hours a day in total.
So if you manage to focus for 3 hours, you did great. Being aware of this allows you to schedule in full focus sessions. Ideally, you want between one and three focus sessions every day if you want to be sustainable. Sure, maybe you did so much work in that all-nighter you pulled off last year, but realistically speaking, you can't do that every time there's something important to do. This works on a macro level as well; high performers usually focus for about 3 to 5 months on a project and then take a couple of months off to recharge.
Number eight: Practice spatial reasoning. Your focus comes from your mind, and your brain power acts like any other muscle. If you train it, it gets stronger. We found spatial reasoning to be a great way to do that. It means the ability to visualize and manipulate 3D objects and shapes in your mind. Scientists have even used this to improve mathematical skills in young students.
It's not something essential to do, but it might be a great practice method to assess and improve your brain power.
Number nine: Digital minimalism. We were introduced to this topic a couple of months ago, and we love it. It's something so simple and intuitive, yet so powerful when you actually put it into practice. We've been using it constantly since then, and it works great. Essentially, you don't need like 80% of the things you think you do.
That includes hardware, software, websites, tools, apps, and everything in between. It takes very few things for you to function as a normal human being, so find a moment in your day or a day in your week where you limit yourself to just those things. Yeah, we know you invested so, so much in your setup to achieve peak productivity, but if you want to truly focus, stick to the absolute basics. It'll do wonders for your focus.
Number ten: Never ever multitask. Ever. Multitasking is a fancy name for being mediocre at multiple things all at once. What you're actually doing is task switching or, in other words, jumping from one task to another extremely quickly, losing focus in the process. You can't just instantly focus on something; it takes a little bit of time to get into it.
Imagine you're trying to push five balls up a hill with one hand behind your back. No matter how hard of a push you're going to give each ball, you still spend more energy trying to not let the balls roll back down the hill. You're not really making that much progress, are you?
And lastly, for the true Aluxers sticking with us until the end, of course, we've got a bonus: do bad work first. For hanging with us this long, you get the best tip: doing bad work first. Now, let's just say you have to write something, but you're staring at a blank Google Doc page for the past hour. You just can't seem to focus, and your mind is flying in all kinds of directions. You barely get the title down, and you feel like you're out of juice already.
Well, the secret here is to just do bad work first. Just write whatever comes to mind. Don't bother with grammar or making sure everything makes sense; just sit there and do bad work. Eventually, your mind will start to focus on what you're doing, and ideas will begin to flow. You'll be able to make that bad work great work. This works regardless of what you're trying to focus on; just be extremely bad at first.
It's way easier to edit something poorly done than it is to come up with something good right out the gate. Now, on the topic of focus, procrastination always comes second. A couple of months ago, we made a great video on how to eliminate procrastination by following one simple method. You can watch it next by clicking in the top right corner or in the link in the description.