With so many distractions around you these days, focusing on anything has become a formidable task. This affects your ability to keep you attentive in learning anything that results in the impairment of your ability to make sound judgement. Unfortunately, this is vital in your day-to-day living, but especially in doing business. Studies show that the attention span of many has shrunk from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds today! This means that the ability of people to retain information has decreased considerably, a bleak future to attain success.
In order to prevent being victimized by this phenomenon and maintain your productivity, here are some tricks for you:
- Set a time for regular exercise. Instead of reaching for a cup of coffee to boost the mental and cognitive functions of your brain, flex your muscles. It has been proven that exercise is not only good for your heart and your weight. It can also helps extend your attention span, thus making you smarter. According to Dr. John J. Ratley, an associate psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School: “exercise is really for the brain, not the body. It affects mood, vitality, alertness, and feeling of well-being”.
- Stay hydrated. A study made by The Journal of Nutrition proves that even mild dehydration can adversely affect attentiveness. The advice of taking 8 glasses of water a day is not obsolete. Instead, experts recommend 9 cups of water for women and 15.5 cups for men to maintain ideal body hydration.
- Concentrate on the more important things. Usually, these are those issues that keep you stressed and worried. Narrow down your focus on them instead of filling your brain with a hotchpotch of unrelated details and trivia the blur your focus. Once you have sifted through all the mess in your head and selected the few that matter most to you, you can laser-focus on them. Think this way often until close-focusing becomes a second nature to you.
Avoid distractions. Technology has brought a myriad of convenience especially in the area of communication. Unfortunately, these technological breakthroughs also brought with them distractions that eat a big chunk of people’s productive time. Staying focused on important issues has become a constant struggle. To counteract this onslaught of mental confusion, learn to avoid them by limiting your access to the internet, the radio, or the TV. Set and strictly abide by a schedule of engaging in them. An hour in the morning and another one by late afternoon should be enough time to visit your social media accounts. Put your phone and other gadgets on silent mode during working hours. Make sure no TV set or radio is within hearing distance from your desk and so are conditioning units that could lull you to sleep while at work.
- Never multitask. Concentrating on more than one thing at a time is a waste of time and energy. It may cause you to finish many things at once but at the expense of accuracy and satisfactory quality. Multitasking wrecks havoc to your concentration. Chances are, more time and energy would be wasted correcting all the mistakes due to your lack of proper focus and the haphazard ways tasks are accomplished.
So tackle one objective at a time. Focus on it until the task is completed. This will result to your more significant progress with less stress involved.
- Divide your goals into smaller, do-able chunks. Biting more than you could chew could result to indigestion and eventual abandonment of tasks. This is often due to loss of focus on any individual task. Although it is admirable to set the standards for your goals high, they can overwhelm you. The trick is to divide your big goals into more do-able sizes and work on each portion one after the other. This way, you keep focused on what you are presently doing only without distractions.
Maintaining your full focus to the task on hand is the key to attaining its completion. Sporadic attention will result to lose of motivation and abandonment of the task altogether. To improve your ability to sustain your attention on any task, do not get discouraged by distractions that cross your way but always try to snap out of it and re-focus. Focus, distraction, and re-focus is the normal cycle that leads you to accomplish any task and following the above tricks will help you in this.