How to Get Focused and Stay Motivated

Learn how to master the art of focus and productivity where the art of concentration becomes your most powerful tool for success. In our latest episode, we move through the chaos of daily distractions, providing you with the strategies to keep your eyes on your goals. We discuss how legends like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett attribute their remarkable achievements to a steadfast focus, and cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Sahar Youssef debunks the multitasking myth, revealing the costly toll of the 'switching tax.' I'll take you through a journey of understanding both internal and external distractions and serve up five actionable tips that will hone your focus and increase your productivity.

Feel the pulse of motivation as you're invited to join the conversation with the Ontraclife coaching community, where we share insights, triumphs, and tactics for maintaining concentration amidst life's distractions. We extend heartfelt thanks for tuning in and remind you to scoop up your copy of the Mindset Makeover – your compass for navigating the challenges on the path to becoming the most extraordinary version of yourself. Share these focus-fueling insights with friends who might be seeking the clarity that you've discovered here today. Keep your aim true, and your mind clear, and join us again next week for another enriching episode. Stay focused and take care, friends.

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About Wendy Johnson:

I'm a certified life coach for women who want to take their 'good' lives and make them extraordinary with personal development and life coaching tools. If you are going to find your passion, increase your self-confidence, make more money, strengthen your relationships, build your business, and do it with less struggle and frustration then you're in the right place. My programs are for busy women who want to feel better and live well in their everyday lives.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

We're listening to the Extraordinary Every Day Podcast with Wendy Johnson, episode number 44.

Speaker 3: 0:08

Welcome to the Extraordinary Every Day Podcast, where women come to be inspired and motivated to become the best version of themselves and elevate the quality of their everyday. Now here's your host, certified life coach, wendy Johnson.

Speaker 1: 0:26

Hello, beautiful friends, hope you're all doing well. I am thrilled to be with you today. I caught a 24-hour stomach bug and had to take the last two days off, and I'm recording this on late Friday afternoon before I go out for a Valentine's Day meal that we had to postpone a couple of days ago. This is not normal, but I'm actually very focused and excited and I've decided today to talk to you about focus, what it is, what causes us to lose focus, and then five ways to get more focus and get into the zone. Let's get started First.

Speaker 1: 1:18

What is focus? Focus is this mental state when we pay attention to one single task and we ignore all the distractions. And in today's world, the environment is loaded with distractions, and that means that when you really want to focus, you have to prioritize and you have to concentrate on one thing and you have to ignore dozens of other things going on. And the only way we can get difficult things done and think creatively and do our work efficiently is if we focus, and when we focus we get things done better and faster and we avoid burnout and procrastinating, and then, at the end of the day, you will feel accomplished, like you've accomplished something.

Speaker 1: 2:21

I love this. It's said that Bill Gates met Warren Buffett and someone asked them to each write down on a slip of paper what the secret is to their success. And they each wrote down focus. That was their single success word, the first one that they came up with, and that makes sense, because it doesn't matter how much energy or motivation, if you aren't efficiently focused and targeted on something your need can get it done. You're at your best, your healthiest and your most productive time all at the same time when you're focused. Let's talk about that today how to get and stay that way.

Speaker 1: 3:14

The number one common reason you can't focus and that is trying to multitask, where you're working on your project or your goal, whatever it is that you want to be focused on but you're doing something else during that time. You're checking your phone, you're switching over to an email, you're checking your you just thought about something and you're checking the internet for something. Maybe you're talking to a coworker or somebody who lives in your house. They've just walked by your office and they're talking to you. The brain is not wired to multitask. So when you're trying to do the one thing along with all these other things, you're actually switching between those tasks at lightning speed and every time you switch it's costing you. It's costing you time to get back to the focus and you're getting less done and you're making more mistakes when you're trying to multitask.

Speaker 1: 4:29

I received a call about four years ago and this person asked if they could work with me for a short time and receive coaching. It was about work-life balance and they found themselves always working, whether they were at work or whether they were at home, and so we kind of dialed down how she was spending her time at work and then how she was spending her time at home. I'm gonna give you just an idea of the off balance, of what I found immediately, and that was the time that they wanted to spend with their spouse. In the evening. She was sitting in front of the TV with her spouse, but she was also sitting in front of the TV with her laptop, checking her emails, writing emails, shopping, so she was multitasking, and then she couldn't figure out the next day why she was so tired and burned out, because she never gave herself time to relax and to visit with her spouse or to really enjoy the show or movie they were watching. She was still in that work mode, but she was getting very little done, and I love what Dr Sahar Youssef. She's a cognitive neuroscientist at UC Berkeley and she says multi-tasking is a myth. In reality, it's rapidly switching from one task to another and then back again, and every time you make that switch you pay a tax on both your time and your energy. For that reason, it's almost always more efficient to monotask Focus on one thing and move on when you're done, so you don't pay unnecessary switching taxes. I love that. Switching taxes. I've never heard it before. I read this.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Another important thing you wanna know about focus are the distractions. Are they internal distractions or are they external distractions? And this is the best way to be able to combat the distractions in the first place is to understand if they are internal or external. Internal distractions are made up of your own ideas and thoughts in your head, like when you sit down to work but suddenly you feel that urge to check your email or look up something on the internet. And an external distraction is when you're interrupted by others, like a coworker or a family member at your home a friend sending you a text. So it's good to know the difference between these two and what type of distractions you're having issues with.

Speaker 1: 7:32

So now I wanna give you five tips to boost your focus and get in that zone, and the first one is your focus begins with how you set your goals. A goal is like a compass, and they help you decide what's important to focus on and what you can deprioritize. So imagine you have a goal to have a certain amount of engagement on an ad or on your website or on your social media. So you have that goal in mind. You decide then to block time for the tasks that you need to reach that goal over this next month or quarter. Having clarity on a goal is like a compass. They help you decide what's important to focus on, what you can deprioritize. So if you know that you have a project, that you're working on a paper, whatever it is, you know you're not going to answer emails, or you know you're not going to take phone calls and you're going to avoid getting sidetracked with less important things. So what you want to do is give yourself clarity, create that smart goal. A goal is specific, it's measurable, it's achievable, it's realistic and it's time bound, and that's why it's called a smart goal. And they provide that roadmap and a finish line for what you're wanting to accomplish.

Speaker 1: 9:12

And then in the morning you want to have your most important tasks and those are MITs and you're writing down one to three things that you want to accomplish. Maybe it's only one. You can get the one task done and move on to the second task or the third task, but this helps you focus and gives you permission to clock out a certain block of time to accomplish it and that way you're avoiding the burnout and you're maintaining that long-term focus. And the second way to boost your focus and get into the zone is to set up triggers. Maybe you have triggers and you don't even realize it.

Speaker 1: 10:01

This cognitive brain scientist says our brains have memories. When we pair a certain environment with a specific stimulus, like sitting at a clean desk and writing, your mind has a cognitive association. It remembers and anticipates the stimulus in the future. This means the next time you clear off your workspace and you sit down to write, your brain will be predisposed to focus on that task. And if you're having trouble concentrating, try creating these cognitive associations to let your brain know it's time to focus.

Speaker 1: 10:43

And let me give you some ideas. Maybe you have a candle at your desk and before you begin your focused work, you light your candle. Or maybe you have a specific beverage that you drink. This is what I do. Before I walk into my office, I have a glass of water and a hot cup of herbal tea. Also, if I'm doing the type of work where I can have low background music, I play focused music. That's another cue that this is focus time. I shut my door.

Speaker 1: 11:21

Maybe you wear specific clothing, maybe you work better in certain clothing and also start with a clean desk, a clean slate, maybe having that cleared off the night before, and you go to a specific location, a location or environment where you know you work best, whether it's your office, coffee shop or a specific area in your house. And the third way to boost your focus is to train your mind to work in small increments, and this is a time management strategy. It helps you focus by avoiding the multitasking and understanding how you're spending your time. And what I've mentioned before on videos and other podcasts is using the Pomodoro technique. You don't need to focus for long periods of time to get a lot of things done. This technique uses 25 minute work sessions and a five minute break, so you can tackle one task at a time and this helps you reduce mental fatigue.

Speaker 1: 12:34

And then you use that five minute timer to take your break. You stand up, you move around, take a few deep breaths, go outside for a minute and also what you wanna do is to time walk. If you know how long something takes, you can schedule it into your calendar, into your day. It helps you reclaim your day and understand how you're spending your time. You already know what you're doing for the rest of your day. If you've had that time blocked and time boxing is where you aim to finish a specific task during a certain timeframe, maybe you know how long it takes. Maybe you know you can respond to emails or inquiries and give yourself a 30 minute or one hour time block. And one of my favorite strategies is to eat the frog, and that's your most important, most difficult task. First. It's what matters, it's your number one goal. As Mark Twain once said, if you eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you throughout the day. I love that. So it's the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule, and what it states is 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes, and when it comes to productivity. This means some tasks have significantly more impact than others and if you focus on those, you maximize your impact. So you can use that principle. You can eat it the frog, do it first thing in the morning. You can put the time block in your calendar and you can use the Pomodoro. Can you all amaze yourself? You'll feel so good at the end of the day for what you've accomplished.

Speaker 1: 14:34

The fourth way to boost your focus is to schedule your tasks around your ultradium rhythm and, as you already know, your focus fluctuates throughout the day and the week and there's times when you can quickly write something or finish a project and other times where it just feels so unnatural and challenging to be able to even sit down and get anything done. So it's best to recognize when you're likely to be at your optimum level, and we all run on this 24-hour internal clock and that's our circadian rhythm. This dictates when we go to sleep, wake up and experience peak levels of energy, and within that 24-hour day we cycle through these 90-minute blocks of heightened focus and productivity, and that's known as the ultradium rhythm and the way to understand that. Maybe you already know or maybe you have to figure it out. Are you AM focused, pm focused Record your level of focus and enthusiasm and energy at the same times each day, at hourly intervals, and you'll know from your note gathering when you're most focused and when you're most energetic and match those tasks with that ultradium rhythm. So you'll wanna do the hard thing during that time. It's those creative, strategic projects, the things that you're reaching for, and you wanna do all those admin things when you have less energy and you're more prone to distraction.

Speaker 1: 16:28

And the last way to boost your focus is to choose the right location. Sometimes you need to step into a different space and hit the reset button on your brain and then it will allow you to be more productive and creative. One of the easiest ways to change your behavior is to change your environment. And if you want to improve your focus, look at working in the right location and you can create different workspaces for different kinds of work. Let's say you work at home. Maybe you dedicate one project to your desk in your office, or maybe you dedicate a project to the table. Maybe you need to face a certain direction. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset button and I want to say most people will not be more productive if they're sitting slouching in a living room couch where they usually watch TV, or lying on a bed where you're used to sleeping. And I make sure when I'm in a hotel room and I travel quite a bit and work from the hotel I'm not working on the bed, I'm working at the desk in the room or I go down to the workspace and sometimes I'm most creative when I move everything outside to a table in the shade and I can get a lot of work done outside. I know many women that I've worked with need to be in an environment where other people are working and they're entrepreneurs. So they go to a co-op workspace and they're sharing a big table with other people. They need that environment. Or maybe they go to the same coffee shop and they are always working there. They need the noise and the distraction.

Speaker 1: 18:37

And so let's recap the five tips to boost your focus and get in the zone. The first one was your focus starts with how you set your goals. The second one is setting up triggers. The third one is to train your mind to work in small increments. The fourth is to schedule tasks around your ultradium rhythm. And the fifth is to choose your right location. I would love to hear what works for you. Please hop on over to YouTube, subscribe and leave me a comment. I would love to know what helps you stay focused and always. I appreciate you being here and please share with a friend if you think this can help. I know there's a lot of people out there who need this, who need focus and who are living in letting distraction interfere with what truly matters to them in their lives. Thank you so much for being here and I look forward to being back next week with you. Take care, friends. Bye, bye.

Speaker 2: 20:11

That's O-N-T-R-A-C. Lifecoachingcom forward slash join. I'd love to see you in there and if you haven't grabbed your copy of the Mindset Makeover, head over to ontracklifecoachingcom forward slash makeover and get a copy that teaches and inspires you to show up as your most extraordinary self.