Happy Labor Day weekend everyone! September is a celebration of the many invaluable contributions that workers have made to the growth of companies, industries, and countries. Not only do we work for our families, but our work contributes to company growth, and in a much larger scale, industry growth and nation building. So to honor the hardworking employees and workers, we’ll kick off this month with the first article of a series of Ways to Stay Focused. Here are the first few tips:
- Minimize multitasking
Minimize multitasking or stop altogether! You think you’re being more productive by juggling multiple tasks at the same time but really, you’re NOT. A study published in Psychology today says that you lose up to 40% of your productivity by multitasking. That’s because you are not really multitasking but switching from task to task. In the time it takes to switch from one task to another is really what eats through your productive hours.
Here’s the deal, psychology research shows that people can only focus on one cognitive task at a time. This means you can only focus on one mental activity at a time. If it involves brain work, you can’t juggle two things at once. So focus your brain power on your most important task to stimulate your brain. The rest will be easy peasy.
- Meditate
Now is the time to learn how to meditate. If you haven’t started yet, you can read about it here. Try to incorporate meditation breaks into your workday. There are many benefits to it and you’ll feel less overwhelmed. Taking meditation breaks improves our memory retention, increases our focus, reduces our stress levels and stabilizes our emotional responses, gives our brain true rest, and improves our brain power.
- Exercise regularly
Ah, the many benefits of exercise! It not only improves how you look and feel physically but also does wonders to improve your concentration. Chemicals get released into our brain that improve its retention and focus capacity. A study conducted at the University of Illinois shows evidence that students who exercise moderately before taking a test that measured attention spans performed better than students who didn’t exercise. What happens is this: exercise primarily helps improve focus by improving our brain’s ability to ignore distractions. In this era of a thousand and one social media platforms and digital distractions, that super power is very valuable.
- Make a to-do list
No office worker can live without a To-Do list. So I’m sure you don’t need a lecture on the merits of keeping a To-Do list to keep yourself focused on what need to get done by the end of the day. But you can incorporate Productivity Boosting Techniques to your list making in order to supercharge your productivity I’ve written about some techniques previously. Try the different techniques discussed last month like the GTD method, Eat the Frog, and The Action method.
There you have it! Some tips to improve your focus at work. Stay tuned for more tips. If you have some tips on staying focused at work, we’d love to hear about them in the comments? As always, remember to: Stay Humble, Hustle Hard. Good luck!
Written by Jaie O.- The Help