Episode 541 · Mar 4, 2022

How to Get Focused and Increase Your Productivity

Listen

If your plate is already full and the work keeps piling on, you are not alone. In this episode of The Daily Mastermind, George Wright III tackles one of the most common struggles high performers face: staying focused in a world built to distract you. Even when you are producing at a high level, it is easy to feel scattered, reactive, and overwhelmed.

George shares a practical list of the strategies he personally uses to cut through the noise, reclaim his attention, and drive real clarity into his day. These are simple, repeatable habits you can start applying today to get more done without burning out.

Why Eliminating Distractions Comes First

The foundation of focus is removing what pulls you away from it. George recommends consciously creating space to work and setting clear expectations with the people around you about when you are available and when you are not.

A lot of us, we set ourselves up for failure because we respond instantly to text messages or instantly to phone calls. And so people expect that from you.

Build a system so people know how to reach you in a true emergency, but understand that non-critical messages will get a response later. When you stop being reactive and start being proactive, you protect the space you need to do meaningful work.

How Time Blocking Helps You Go Deeper

Time blocking is a strategy used by many high performers, and for good reason. George suggests creating blocks of roughly 90 minutes where you focus intensely on a single task.

Most projects take a little while to ramp up before real creativity and effectiveness start to flow. By chunking your time into dedicated blocks, you give your mind room to settle in and reach that productive state instead of constantly restarting.

What to Do About Your Phone and Social Media

Your phone is one of the most powerful tools you own, and also one of the biggest distractions. George recommends not just turning it off during focused work, but turning off notifications entirely.

These notifications are constantly training your mind to be reactive and to constantly get those dopamine hits from notifications.

The same applies to social media. Limit it to a specific time of day or a set amount of time. When you default to scrolling every time you have a free moment, you train your brain to crave constant stimulation, which erodes your creativity and peace of mind. Instead, learn to crave moments of silence and mental recovery.

Why Nutrition and Sleep Fuel Your Focus

Focus is not only a mental discipline; it is physical. The food you eat feeds your brain, your energy, and your creativity. George points to guidance from Harvard Medical on brain-supporting foods like leafy greens such as kale and spinach, fatty fish like salmon, berries, and walnuts, with caffeine in smaller doses if you need it.

Sleep is just as critical. George rejects the idea that you can sleep when you are successful, because sleep is one of the key ingredients that makes success possible. Build a wind-down routine, keep your room cool and dark, and remove distractions so you can get the rest your mind needs.

How Goals, Mindfulness, and Target Lists Create Clarity

Clear direction makes focus easier. George recommends setting SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Ambiguous goals leave you without direction, while clear goals give you steps you can actually act on.

He also builds a mindfulness practice into his routine to train his mind to stay present, and he sets a target list the night before of the three most important things to accomplish the next day. That list lets your subconscious work overnight and gives you a clear win to aim for, no matter what else the day throws at you.

Why You Should Stop Multitasking

Multitasking is the enemy of results. Focus means following one course until successful, and jumping between unrelated tasks does the opposite. George recommends grouping similar work together, like batching all your marketing or all your writing into the same block, so you can execute at a high level instead of scattering your attention.

Clarity creates focus. Clarity in where you're going, what you want to do, how you're going to get there.

Action Steps

Create protected blocks of about 90 minutes to focus intensely on one task at a time.
Turn off notifications and limit social media to a set window each day.
Watch your nutrition and prioritize enough quality sleep to fuel your energy and creativity.
Set SMART goals and write down your top three priorities the night before.
Group similar tasks together and stop multitasking.

Clarity is what makes all of this click into place. When you know where you are going and what matters most, your schedule, priorities, and targets line up, and focus stops feeling like such a fight. Start with one or two of these habits today and build from there.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. George Wright III here with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. And today I want to talk to you about focus. So many people that I've talked with in the last little while have been struggling with finding their direction, getting more results, getting more productivity. And even if you're producing at a really high level, we find ourselves often distracted and overwhelmed. And if you're producing at a high level, you're probably like me as well. You have so many things coming onto your plate, but you already have your plate pretty full. So what can you do to get focused? I mean, you know, we've talked about, in fact, I had a good friend and student of mine that wrote an article recently on Focus, Follow One Course Until Successful. And he had some great comments in there. and it got me thinking as well with many of the people that I've talked with lately that with all the distractions we have in the world, what can you do? What are some things you can do to really get focused and drive down a level of clarity in your day-to-day events? So I came up with a list, just a bunch of ideas of things that I do in order to get focused. And I want to kind of share that with you, hopefully spur some creativity in your own mind and give you some ideas on how you can get focused. So let me run through this list with you and I hope you can gain some things from it. The first thing in the obvious course is you've got to get rid of distractions. It's very, very important that if you want to get focused or if you want to get results in your life, you've got to be able to eliminate distractions. And the way you do this is you consciously create space for you to focus on things that you're working on. So you have to set yourself up for success. You have to make sure that you're clear with people that you engage with at your work or wherever else, that there are times that you don't want to be interrupted. Or when you are creating some space for you to work on a project, you have to allow for systems that people know how they can get a hold of you and how they can, if there's an emergency or something they need to do, get a hold of you. But that if it's not critical, that there are other times that you'll get back with them. So you give yourself a window. See, a lot of us, we set ourselves up for failure because we respond instantly to text messages or instantly to phone calls. And so people expect that from you. And then when you don't, you get struggles and you get bad communication. So you have to prepare and get yourself set up for success and eliminate those distractions from coming in throughout the day. And stop being so reactive and be more proactive. Second, I really highly recommend time blocking. And this is a strategy that a lot of very successful high performers use Time blocking involves creating spaces of time usually about 90 minutes where you focus on a single task and you focus intensely on that task for that specific period of time, whatever the time is. What you're basically doing is you're chunking your time into blocks that allow you to get more creative. I mean, I think many of you know that when you start a project, usually it takes a little while to get into that task or project before the true creativity and effectiveness starts to flow. And so you've got to give yourself time for that through this idea of time blocking. Third is you've got to turn off your phone. I mean, this is definitely one of the things I think we all know, but we don't do. You've got to be able to get rid of those negative and those positive and even those constant distractions from your phone. If you're like me or if you're like most people, You've got Messenger and WhatsApp and DMs and email and text messages and social media apps, everything that's giving you notifications. And not just turn off your phone, but one of the things I highly recommend is to turn off the notifications. Because even when you're around your phone and you're not blocking out your time, these notifications are constantly training your mind to be reactive and to constantly get those dopamine hits from notifications. And so I really recommend that you manage your phone, which is an amazing tool, but also an amazing distraction. Manage it properly. And this leads right in to the fourth thing is you've got to cut off, eliminate, or gauge or regulate your social media. We know that most everyone is on social media, but one of the things that social media does is it works to train your mind to be reactive and distracted. So the best thing that I could recommend, even if it's not about identifying your schedule, is limit your social media to a specific time of day or limit it to a specific amount of time. When you do that, you're basically telling your mind that you're in control and you're setting the parameters. And it's really super important that you do this. When you just automatically, by default, when you're free with your time, jump in and start scrolling through social media, what you're doing is you're training your brain to always need to be fed with distractions. And that eliminates your creativity and your peace of mind and things like that. What you need to do is crave those moments of silence and crave those moments of recovery with your mind. And so try to limit and gauge your social media. Another really, really critical one that a lot of people don't think about, this fifth suggestion I have is monitor and regulate your nutrition and your supplements. Harvard Medical suggests things like green leafy vegetables like kale, spinach, broccoli, fatty fish like salmon berries walnuts caffeine in minor smaller doses throughout the day if you need it But the amount of food and the type of food that you put into your body is what feeds your brain It what feeds your creativity It what feeds your energy levels So if you're not consciously watching and monitoring and regulating your nutrition and supplements, then you're doing yourself a disservice because that can highly, highly affect your amount of creativity that you have as well as the amount of production that you have. And this goes hand in hand with my sixth suggestion, which is sleep. You've got to get enough sleep. I'm not a subscriber of this. You don't need to sleep. You can sleep when you're successful because the sleep is one of those key ingredients that helps you to be successful and helps you to have energy. So make sure you get enough sleep. Make sure that you have a routine or ritual you do to wind down so that you can get to sleep. If you struggle with sleep, you've got to look into what the environment is you have. Make sure it's a cool temperature. Make sure that you have good, comfortable conditions. Make sure that you don't have distractions. You eliminate the light in your room. Get enough sleep. Another thing that I suggest is create SMART goals. SMART is an acronym you've probably heard before, S-M-A-R-T, SMART goals. Make sure your goals are specific. They're measurable. They're achievable. They're relevant and they're timely. The reason these five things are critical with your goals is because when you set goals that are really ambiguous and general, then sometimes you struggle to find the direction and the focus that you need. And it's hard to be focused if your goals are really unspecific and unmeasurable and unachievable or not timely. You know, if they're unrealistic, then it's going to be very hard for you to manage the steps you need to move forward with them. So set SMART goals. Another suggestion I have is you've got to have a mindfulness practice. See, in order to create focus, you've got to train your mind to be focused. And so the best way to do that is to have a mindfulness practice. This is a practice where you're going to be aware of your current situation. The worst thing you could do is have something you're working on but be thinking about nine other things at the same time. So create a mindfulness practice by finding a specific time of day, being consistent. Consistency is the most important. And then whether it's guided or unguided, just make sure you have the right environment. There's a lot of amazing apps. I actually use multiple apps because I, depending on the time of day, depending on what I'm trying to accomplish, you know, there's the Calm meditation app. I use Wake Up app with Sam Harris. And then I have a new app I use for, it's called Brain FM, which has some really, really good guided music, background sound things like that that you can use for your mind to get on those brain wavelengths that help you to be the most creative So create a mindfulness practice Let's see. Also, I had set some target lists. I always, the night before, try to list three things, the most important things, that I want to get done the next day. That does a couple of things. It allows my mind throughout the night, subconscious, to be working on how I'm going to accomplish those tasks. but also when I get up the next day, I always try to focus on getting the most important things done. Despite all the distractions and the big long priority lists that you have, you'll know that those are the three most important things for you to work on. And so it's always good to have a target list of the top three things. That's another way you can also have a win regardless of what happens throughout the day. The tenth suggestion I have for you is you've got to stop multitasking. Multitasking is going to be the enemy of you getting results because focus is exactly what it says. Follow one course until successful. Even when you're breaking that down into time chunks, you've got to focus, and multitasking does the exact opposite of that. So multitasking doesn't work if you're trying to get results in a specific area, and also I always recommend grouping things. So if you have similar tasks, try to group those into the same time blocks rather than trying to jump between completely random tasks of things like marketing and operations or content creation and writing copy. You've got to group things that are similar, and that'll help you to really, really get clear on what you need to do, and then you can execute at a real high level. The last thing I want to suggest is this. You've got to learn to be more specific and clear on what it is you're trying to accomplish, because when you have clarity, your schedule, your priorities, your targets, They all make perfect sense and they line up perfectly. See, clarity creates focus. Clarity in where you're going, what you want to do, how you're going to get there. Clarity in the strategy and the strategic planning you have, that's going to create focus for you. And it's going to make it much simpler. It won't be such an effort for you to try to create focus. Anyway, that's a big long list, but those are all ideas that I use in order to get focus. And I hope they're things that can help you to get focused as well. And do me a favor. let me know what you're struggling with. Help me to understand what I can do to help you get more clear on your goals. Hit me up on The Daily Mastermind at Instagram or Facebook. DM me. Happy to help. Happy to do anything I can to help you to get focused as well. That's my message for today. I hope it's something that brings you a little bit more clarity. And I look forward to talking with you more tomorrow. My name is George Wright III, and this has been The Daily Mastermind. Have a great day. Thank you.