How to Improve Your Focus and Job Productivity

How good are you at focusing?

Did you know that focus isn’t just a natural talent? You can actually get better at it!

The Art of Focusing is how to organize your life or your work to get sh** (stuff) done!

This is a practice that we’re not really taught in school but that is a very useful habit to create in order to have career success and job satisfaction.

You have to get things done at work. You have to deliver at your job. In this current culture where Information is coming at us all the time, most of us have developed a habit of NOT focusing.

Does Multitasking Work?

Phone vibrating? Messenger dinging? IM beeping?

Maybe you think you’ve got it covered by quickly switching your focus among several different tasks.

The reality is that “multitasking” doesn’t usually get results. Instead, it keeps you constantly busy. As a result, you get overwhelmed with your lists of things to do. I call this passive action.

The real solution is to focus intensely on ONE THING.

It means ignoring everything else you feel passionate about. It means you have to say no at times. Steve Jobs believed in the Power of Refusal so you could have tunnel vision on ONE thing.

Get Better Focus

Here are my top 3 tips for increasing your focus so you can get more done (and impress your boss!).

1) Practice

Manage your brain. Your brain is the most important operating system in your life. The brain is a tool that wants to be efficient. Focus your brain on ONE THING. An unsupervised brain is like a toddler running around the house with a knife.

2) Anticipate Obstacles

Keep going. You don’t stop because you hit an obstacle.  Do you stop going to the grocery store when you hit a red light?  No, because you’ve anticipated you’ll hit a red light. When you anticipate roadblocks in projects, you’ll start thinking about how to get around them without totally losing focus.

3) Limit Your Time

Don’t give yourself a ton of time to complete a project. Put some pressure on yourself to finish faster. Even if the result you get is not perfect, that’s OK. Know that B- work is still good and the point is to GET IT DONE!

What does this look like in practice?

Here’s an example of me during my corporate career:  7 meetings a day, each one with a different topic. I had to get my work done by 5pm.

It’s easy not to know where to start. It’s easy to just react: answer emails and calls, or get overwhelmed and zone out by texting or looking at Instagram. But if I did that, I would be at my desk all night, every night!

Instead, I acted like a timer was ticking. I focused on one task at a time. My priority was to get them all done in a passable way rather than get one done perfectly and let the rest build up. Otherwise, tasks would just pile up for the next day! I had to work fast and practice the Art of Focusing.

You can practice the Art of Focusing, too. Use the three tips in this post to give your focus a workout and make it stronger over time.

If you found this helpful and want to go deeper into how to acquire job satisfaction and master the Art of Focus, schedule a complimentary coaching session.

And remember ...."Life doesn't just happen. You make life happen."