#606 How to find more focus

And I think the reason, the kind of prompt for this, I guess, was all about focus and wanting to pay attention and do good quality work.

And I'm very mindful that switching, so when we sort of switch and split our attention across different things, it sort of steals our focus.

And when you do switch, then going back to what you're doing, what you were doing before, getting kind of back up to speed with that takes a little while.

And we probably all recognize that feeling where you're like, oh, what was I doing? What was the sentence that I was writing? So that kind of classic common sense rule of work of do one thing at once is definitely really good advice.

But it's very easy to say.

And I think we all appreciate it's kind of hard to do.

So what has helped me? So number one, what are the notifications that you need and what are the notifications that you just want? I was actually doing this exercise with a big group last week where we all lined up from the least to the most notifications.

And I was kind of chatting to people about it, quite a lot of people at the start of their career.

And some of their notifications, they were just like, oh, I sort of want that notification, which is, that's okay, right? But it's sort of recognizing, but do you want it in the middle of your workday? Do you want them interrupting your day all of the time? And we all kind of like, and I still like, you know, the dopamine hit that you get from a notification that comes through.

you know, that's what they are designed to do.

But I think a useful question is perhaps what are the notifications that I need to do my job really well? And what are the notifications that I kind of want because I get that kind of feeling of being wanted, but you know what, I don't actually need them.

Because though my notifications are currently very low, I have definitely been in jobs where maybe I do need the notifications from my manager in case there's something urgent.

maybe I do need notifications from a certain team if I'm there to support them.

So some notifications might be part of me doing my job really well, and that's okay.

But I think this first point, which is probably the most important one, is you choosing.

You opting in and out of the notifications that you kind of want as part of your day, rather than just letting them happen to you.

Because I that's where we've got to where we are is it wasn't that we went i would like 187 notifications it's just they accumulated over time so perhaps start off with that exercise Two, another top tip is do not disturb, I think is your best friend.

Anything that adds a bit of friction to notifications.

So maybe you do need notifications for some of the time, but maybe putting do not disturb on for an hour a day, for a couple of hours a day is more realistic than just sort of cutting out your notifications in perhaps the brutal way that I've just described.

So what are those small ways that you could find some friction? to stop those kind of notifications like popping up or distracting or your kind of eyes going in a different direction.

Number three, I like this one as sort of setting a challenge a bit to yourself.

Can you build up your sticking power? And your sticking power is how long can you last at a single task before you get distracted? And for some people that might be really short, that might be five minutes.

For other people, you might be at an hour.

over time I think almost tracking that perhaps tracking that for a month it depends on the sort of tasks you do the sort of job that you have but almost being like right my aim is to double my sticking power so maybe you start at five minutes and actually get into 10 minutes would be a real win but maybe you're at 30 and you're going to aim to get to an hour Because those things are connected, the one thing at once and then sticking power.

If you bring those kind of two ideas together, it means your quality of work will go up.