How do I maintain focus on what I’m working on? Hi, I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive Time Management and Productivity training program. If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and become dramatically more productive, just go to WakeUpProductive.com and enter your name and e-mail address and you can watch this video worth $100.00 for free.
So let’s talk about how to keep ourselves focused and maintain that focus. As I learned from Tony Schwartz, the co-author of the book The Power of Full Engagement, which I recommend you read, the greatest power of the human mind is to focus on one thing at a time. We all know that we can only keep one thought or one idea in our conscious mind. Well, focusing on one thing over an extended period of time is what gives us great leverage; it’s what allows us to get a lot done in our lives. The problem in the modern day is that there’s a lot of distraction and interruption and other things competing for our attention, so we lose focus. And the great tragedy isn’t that we just are losing the focus, but we’re losing the ability to focus.
So the first thing to do if you want to maintain focus is to practice maintaining focus. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned about time management is the idea to focus on one thing at a time for an extended period of time. I originally learned this from Peter Drucker who wrote The Effective Executive, and the idea here is that when you focus on one thing, you get a lot more done, the compounding effect of it is dramatic. And so the best thing to do is to set aside blocks of time, I recommend 60 to 90 minutes, minimum. I like to work in blocks of time of an hour, an hour, and then take a 30-minute break, an hour, an hour, and then a 30-minute break because the hour and then a couple of minute break, and then the hour and then a 30-minute break, it really operates with your natural rhythms of your body. One little secret that can dramatically increase your ability to focus is to schedule the breaks that you take. Ernest Rossi wrote a great book called “The 20-Minute Break” and the idea is that our bodies and our systems have these natural rhythms that they go through where we have high energy and low energy. And in the book, he talks about how every 90 minutes, every 90, 120 minutes you want to take a break.
That’s why I like to work for an hour, another hour, and then take a 30-minute break because it kind of optimizes every two and a half hours. You could eat a meal, you can kind of relax, go for a walk or take a longer break. But somewhere in that every 90 to 120 minutes, schedule a break for yourself so that your body can kind of relax and your mind can tune out and your emotions can recover. When you schedule your breaks, you’ll come back much more focused and much stronger. So to maintain focus, what you need to do is get rid of the distraction and interruption, schedule time blocks to work in, an hour, 90 minutes, 120 minutes, ideally, and then very importantly, schedule and take regular breaks. When you schedule and take regular breaks, you’re honoring the way that your system works and you’ll come back very strong from those breaks being able to maintain your focus for longer periods of time.
And finally, if you’d like to learn how to really master time management and productivity, learn how to keep yourself focused, learn how to eliminate procrastination for good, and learn how to create positive habits and eliminate negative ones. Just go to WakeUpProductive.com right now to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and how to make yourself dramatically more productive. The video is worth $100.00, but you can watch it for free by just visiting WakeUpProductive.com, entering your name and e-mail address and opting in. Of course, I’ll also send you many more valuable, free video trainings and I’ll also send you private invitations to listen to me interviewing some of the top experts in the world on business, marketing, success, and productivity, all for free.
Just go to WakeUpProductive.com, enter your name and e-mail address to get it all right now.
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