I’m a Lawyer, and doing my job I need to stay deeply focused on my work.
…But when I have some free time, I love waking up early in the morning, while the city is still sleeping, take a hot shower, have a great breakfast, then I open my laptop and for the next 2 hours I’m completely focused on writing.
Stay focused on my work and my goals is very important for me.
I want to achieve financial freedom as soon as possible, so I need to have a clear goal and a realistically achievable plan.
How to stay focused on work? You must have a method.
I like to write articles and blog posts, and actually, I’m also earning some bucks from it.
If you are asking how to find a method to consistently write articles, I’ll show mine.
I can easily get focused and concentrate in the morning, having no distractions, so I get highly productive.
In the evenings, I am usually tired and very unproductive and I usually cannot do anything that involves mental effort.
Many bloggers write one article a day for a short period of time, but sadly that’s not enough.
If you want real results you simply have to be consistent.
In Deep Work, Cal Newport shares his point of view.
“I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.
Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.”
He works only 3/4 hours a day. And in this time he imposes himself to be highly productive. In this way, he has been able to write many high-quality books and academic papers.
How to Stay Focused on Work: avoid distractions.
Two things can kill your ability to stay focused.
1) comparison;
2) short-term thinking.
Whatever is your field of work, someone will ever be better than you, will write better than you, will be richer than you.
Spending time thinking about how they are better than you, you’ll easily get discouraged, preventing you from taking any action. You get stuck and sad.
So, absolutely avoid comparing your results with those of others.
Without a doubt, there’s someone taller than you, faster than you, cuter than you. We don’t have to look very far to find someone who is better paid, more respected and getting more than his fair share of credit.
And social media: Of course there are people with more followers, more likes and more of just about anything you’d like to measure.
So what? What is the comparison for?
Is your job to be the most at a thing? Perhaps if you play baseball, the goal is to have the highest on-base percentage. But it’s probably more likely that you should focus on the entire team winning the game.
Just because a thing can be noticed, or compared, or fretted over doesn’t mean it’s important, or even relevant.
Better, I think, to decide what’s important, what needs to change, what’s worth accomplishing. And then ignore all comparisons that don’t relate. The most important comparison, in fact, is comparing your work to what you’re capable of. Sure, compare. But compare the things that matter to the journey you’re on. The rest is noise.
Short-term thinking is your second enemy.
Generally, when people start a project they expect to see an immediate result.
Unfortunately, the effects of your decisions are almost always delayed.
Most likely, your current effort will not produce any visible results in the short term.
It will be possible to see something, at best, only in several months.
This is why you must develop long-term thinking.
Give yourself the right amount of time before you quit.
Steven Pressfield in “Tribe of Mentors”, once said:
“I’m 74. Believe me, you’ve got all the time in the world. You’ve got ten lifetimes ahead of you. Don’t worry about your friends “beating” you or “getting somewhere” ahead of you. Get out into the real dirt world and start failing.”
Don’t worry to fail. Just keep going.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every day.”
Give yourself a long-term objective.
Prepare a long-term plan.
Be consistent.
Conclusion
Follow these five simple rules to be Stay Focused and be more productive.
- Identify the time to be highly productive.
- Be Consistent.
- Make a long-term plan.
- Don’t compare yourself to others.
- Avoid short-term thinking.
