11 Ways to Create Focus and Eliminate Distraction

All right, welcome back to The Dealing Mastermind. George Wright III here with your midweek dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. And I want to talk to you a little bit today about attention and about focus and about eliminating and avoiding distraction. You know, many of you listen to individuals like Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vee talks a lot about the value of attention and from a productive standpoint of capturing attention and your ability to be an influencer. But I'll tell you what, businesses, social media, people, everyone out there right now are battling for your attention. And that makes it a real enemy to you creating focus in your life. And so it's no wonder that we can't focus most of our time on things that we need to focus on. And it's the reason that I always emphasize mindfulness and meditation and things that help you in your daily rituals to create focus and eliminate distraction. So how do you really eliminate distraction and create better focus? How do you follow one course until successful? I love that acronym for focus. And ultimately get more done and greater results because the prize for focus is results in your business and in your life. Well, I came across an amazing article by, it's on lifehack.org. Lifehack is a great source of information that I go to at times when I'm trying to expand my knowledge. And there was a great article that mentioned and ran through 11 ideas on how to eliminate distraction. So I want to kind of go through those with you. I want to add a few of my own thoughts. And so let's get right into it. You know, the typical American gets distracted about every 11 minutes. and yet it takes about 25 minutes to get settled into a particular task and be productive. You'll know that if you've ever gotten into meetings and your most creativity came halfway into the meeting. So distractions have a huge cost, a huge opportunity cost on your productivity and the results that you want to create in your business and in your life. And if you want to get better results, you've got to get rid of all the distractions. You've got to consciously, proactively eliminate all of these things competing for your attention. So let's go through these 11 ideas and share them with you. I hope they give you some great thoughts and inspiration for what you can do in your life. Number one, keep your vision and goals in mind. Nothing creates more focus like clarity of what you're trying to accomplish. Clarity of your vision and your why. Those are the things that motivate you to eliminate distractions. So keep your vision and goals right in front of you. Number two, clarify your day before you start. This is a key. You have to start your day with a plan. I've talked over and over about this. You have to have your day scheduled. You have to identify what your priorities are to other people. And you have to be strategic. Have a plan. If you don't have a plan, you're going to easily get distracted. So for those of you that start your day and just sort of fill it in as you go you going to suffer the most from distractions Number three reduce the chaos of your day So how do you reduce the chaos? Because most days seem pretty chaotic. Well, when you're chasing too many priorities, when you start your day with a priority list of 20 things or 30 things, it's going to be really hard to keep your mind focused and eliminate chaos. So I always, always recommend identifying a top three. I do this the night before, but what are the top three most important things that you need to work on? Those are the things that you can focus on. Chaos comes from having too many things to work on. Number four, do those tasks as soon as possible. And you've heard this over and over and over from thought leaders. Start with your top priorities. Start with the most difficult things. Covey calls this filling in the big rocks. and then you fill in all the other little rocks around the big rocks that you have in your life, your biggest priorities. And I also talk about working on the difficult things first for a lot of reasons. Usually, the most difficult things are put to the end. We want to kind of chunk out a bunch of really easy things so we can feel or trick ourselves into feeling that we're productive. But the bottom line is start with the most difficult things first. And the other reason is for what David Goggins talks a lot about, and that is challenge yourself. See, our mind and our lives try to seek the comfort easy things. But if success and productivity and results come from outside your comfort zone, they come from growth, then you've got to seek the difficult things first. So start your day with the most difficult things. That's a huge, huge, huge recommendation, and those things will eliminate distractions. Number five, focus on the smallest part of your work at a time. Now, the easiest way to kill focus is to become overwhelmed with the big picture. Becoming overwhelmed, I mean, it causes discouragement, it causes distraction. Sometimes we get too busy thinking about, you know, and dream building the big picture. So you've got to create bite-sized chunks that lead to sort of a breadcrumb trail right towards your goal and what you need to accomplish. So focus on the smallest items so you can start getting those things done. I don't mean the smallest things on your list. I mean the smallest items on the priority that you're working on. If you're trying to write an article, you gotta start with getting the information you need. You gotta start with writing the first paragraph. Don't try to overwhelm yourself with something too big. Number six, visualize yourself working. Now, not very many people do this, But if you think about it, success leaves clues. Visualization is a very powerful strategy for creating results and focus. Some of the greatest athletes of our time have visualized what they're going to do before they do it. You'll hear that comment. You maybe not have recognized that, but you'll hear that once I say it. You're going to look back and remember hearing that from people. Individuals like Michael Jordan Conor McGregor athletes singers authors You know Michael Jordan would visualize the shot before he made it And what that does is it allows you to do what Brendan Burchard talks about with setting intention. When you get ready to do a task, you have to refocus and set your intention. And so visualizing what you want to do is a great way to do that. Number seven, control the internal chatter. Remember, it all starts up here. I'm pointing to my head, right? It all starts up there. So find ways to prepare your mind for work and focus. Remember, you have to train your mind. Working from home is something a lot of people are doing in this pandemic. And this is an example of something that helps to create a lot of distractions, right? It reminds you that you've got work to do and things to get done and tasks. And it gives you this feeling of guilt or what do you call it? distraction when you feel like you have other priorities that you're missing or that you're not doing or that you got to stay on top of that you should be working on. These are conflicts that happen when you don't cut that internal distraction of thought, which also, you know, relates to your external environment. But these are always the conflicts that you have inside in your mind on these quadrants of urgent, important, you know, not urgent and not important. You know, these things are just stuff that go on in your head. You've got to learn to control and build discipline in your mind so that you can eliminate the internal distractions. Then we move on to number eight, which is remove the external distractions. And this is also something that happens a lot if you're working from home. Don't have the TV on or social media scrolling or your phone. If you're focused and concentrating on a task, turn your ringer off. Don't allow people to interrupt you, close your door if you're in your office. And multitasking is an enemy. This is an external distraction. When you have, like I have, you know, three computer screens, when I'm focused on something that's important, I don't have my email up in a window browser and tasks over here. I focus on one thing. So remove those external distractions. And those could be people, those could be objects, those could be things. Number nine, skip what you don't know. Now this might be a new one for some of you, skipping what you don't know. Because sometimes we go down a rabbit hole trying to figure out a solution to something that we're not good at or something that we don't understand. And this can cause distraction and a lot of wasted time. Try to focus yourself on things that are your unique talent, things that you do know. Don't waste time on things you don't know. Now I'm not saying, let's be real clear here, I'm not saying don't learn. But I'm saying when you're focused on something that's important, a lot of times people go down this rabbit hole of trying to figure things out and it's your mind trying to go off task and research and study and get these things. There's time for learning and there's time for growth and there's time for skill and skill set mastery. But when you're working and you're trying to be productive, don't focus on things you don know Focus on things you do Focus on your talents Number 10 improve your discipline with focus practice This is that linchpin of mindfulness Focus requires discipline. Eliminating distraction requires discipline. And there's two really good ways to create discipline in your day. One is through a mindfulness or meditation practice. This is a great daily ritual because it trains your mind to be present in the moment and focus on what's important and eliminate the distractions. Number two, you could use the Pomodoro method. The Pomodoro method we've talked about before is where you set a timer and you set a time to focus on a task and nothing else. And what this does, remember, time expands to the amount that you give it. So tasks will expand to the amount of time that you give it. If you are working on something for four hours, you're going to take four hours. If you've got one hour, you're going to be more productive and you're going to work on it in one hour. So the Pomodoro Method is a great way to create and eliminate, create, focus, and eliminate distractions. And number 11, the last one is manage your momentum. Many times we forget that momentum helps us, and it's a key ingredient in creating focus and eliminating distraction. When you have momentum, you're staying on the path, you're keeping to task, and you create momentum through consistency and discipline, and quite frankly, progress. Progress and results create momentum, which keep you focused, which keep you moving forward. When you don't have progress, when you don't have momentum, we tend to flounder and kind of move around to different tasks and shiny objects. And so managing your momentum is key. So let's do a quick review. We've got keep your vision and goals in mind. Clarify your day before you start. Reduce the chaos of the day. Do the first, most important things first. focus on the smallest part of the work at a time, visualize yourself working, control the internal distractions, remove the external distractions, skip what you don't know, improve your focus and focus practice, and manage your momentum. The bottom line is you've got to be able to find ways to eliminate distraction. Distraction is the enemy to results. So find ways to train your mind, create focus, and keep forward momentum. So I hope that's helped you. I hope that you'll focus on eliminating those distractions because while everyone else is working to get your attention, you've got to be working on keeping your attention. And that's the message I have for today. I hope you have an amazing day. Please do me a favor and share this podcast. Share it with at least one person. If you got any value, it would mean the world to me, but it would also do a lot for others. Share this podcast. I'll put some links in the show notes to the full article. And if you have any questions, you can obviously reach out to me as well. My name is George Wright III, and this has been The Daily Mastermind. Have a phenomenal day. Talk to you tomorrow.