The Importance of Focus Part 2
Recapping on our previous post, The Importance of Focus, focus is extremely important to our productivity and distractions can be extremely costly.
Here are some tips to help restore your focus:
- Concentrate on one thing at a time. Multitasking means you give a task only part of your concentration which results in poor quality work. A University of Michigan cognitive scientist, David E. Meyer, said “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes” and “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.” René Marois, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt, says the brain has its limits: “[A] core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once.” (Steve Lohr,Slow Down Brave Multitasked, and Don’t Read this in Traffic, New York Times, March 25, 2007).
- Prioritize. Make a list of your tasks for the day, prioritize them and work on each task based on priority. C. Ray Johnson, in one of the final chapters of his book CEO Logic: How to Think and Act like a Chief Executive, says: “Prioritizing is the answer to time management problems- not computers, efficiency experts, or matrix scheduling. You do not need to work faster or to eliminate gaps in productivity to make better use of your time. You need to spend more time on the right things.” (Time Management Guide, Prioritizing Effectively, 2002)
