Focus on Getting Started

I am starting this blog with an emphasis on improving your own focus.

Focus is also known as concentration, which is your ability to keep a specific thought in mind, generally a task at hand.  This may be a project you are working on or it may be something you are trying to learn.

In some cases, it’s easy to maintain your focus.  If you are doing something you enjoy, it’s easy to lose track of time and essentially “get lost” in what you are doing. Of course, you’re not really lost; you’re just so focused on what you are doing that you don’t have any focus on the time you are spending.  So, when you are done, you may be surprised you’ve been at it for hours when it felt to you as though it was just a few minutes.

In a way, this is relativity.  Albert Einstein perhaps put it best when he said, “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”

The problem is that life often requires us to be able to focus on things that, for our attention, are the equivalent of sitting on a hot stove!

It’s not necessarily that we hate a certain task—though it may be the case—but often that we are so bored with it that it becomes a form of mental anguish.  As such, we find ourselves easily drifting from the task at hand onto other, more pleasurable, things.

Of course, we can just “grin and bear it” and power through the task, but that requires some amount of effort and training to reach that point.  Many do this simply by, well, doing it.  Once you form a habit of powering through a task, it becomes a part of your nature.  You can just sit down (or stand as the case may be) and complete the task, whether it is typing a report, reading a book or assembling a part.

There are also exercises we can do to further develop our power of focus or concentration.  I won’t go into those exercises here, as I already have written such an article: “3 Exercises to Improve Your Focus.”  These are good exercises to do.

In a nutshell, these exercises involve practicing focusing on different topics.  First, you start with topics you enjoy.  That’s the easy exercise.  They get a little harder when you need to start focusing on things to which you are ambivalent.  Finally, you focus on things that bore you—the stuff you dislike because it bores you to tears (or nearly to tears, tough guy).

The nice thing about these exercises is that they’re not expensive.  You don’t need to buy a Mind-Flex 2000 (I made that up) or some such thing to “work out” your mind.  You just need pen, paper and a clock—all of which you likely already have.  So, do yourself a favor and learn some exercises in “How to Improve Your Focus.”  The future you will thank you!

These days, we need every edge we can get, especially at work.  So, now more than ever, it’s a good time to polish up on those skills which can make you a better worker.  That also applies if you work for yourself!  You can’t have your employees—especially you!—slacking off!