Listly by Sandeep Kashyap
One of the biggest challenges for employees is to figure out how to stay focused when hundred other things are happening around them. There are multiple factors that contribute to the loss of focus such as our time-wasting habits, distractions, annoying coworkers to name a few. These factors could negatively impact your productivity and overall efficiency.
One of the major reasons why most of us lose our focus is not having a proper plan. As a result, our monkey mind unchains itself and we lose our focus. To tame your monkey mind, try scheduling your tasks hour by hour. It is a great exercise that gives a structure to your workday. You know exactly what to do when and what needs to be accomplished at the end of the day.
Our brain gets directly influenced by the things in front of us or immediately next to us. If your workstation looks like it just got struck by a storm and everything is all messed up, then guess what? That’s exactly how you would be feeling the entire day – distracted and lost.
All of us are different. We have different habits and different styles of working. Some work best when they work in continuation while others bring out their A-game when they work in small intervals of time. Thus, it’s important for us to understand how our body and brain work. We can use this information to develop a technique that works best to increase our attention span.
Sometimes, when you can’t focus on a task anymore, the best thing you can do is to take a break. Our brains are not designed to retain attention for longer hours. Moreover, sitting at your desk looking at the screen for long could lead to lethargy, fatigue, and headache. That’s why it is advisable to take short breaks after every 60 minutes of continuous work.
We all procrastinate, don’t we? However, procrastination is like a credit card, it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill. The thing about procrastination is that it doesn’t have an endpoint, things keep getting postponed for tomorrow. Let’s say you’ve decided to do something the next day that was due for today. In the back of your mind, it is still bothering you and as a result, you find it hard to focus on the task at hand.
Your phone could be your biggest enemy while working. Constant beeps, Whatsapp messages, Facebook notifications could distract you and result in wasting your precious time. Let’s admit whenever we see our phone on the table, there’s this urge to pick it up and check who updated what on their social networking accounts.
One of the other activities that is quite stressful and distracting is email. Every day you get numerous emails – both professional and personal. What’s interesting is that you get emails when you are working on the most important task of the day. Do you know that an average employee spends 1.5 hours a day sending out an approximate of 56 emails?
This could be a shocker for many readers out there. Though, it might not bring the same results for one as it would produce for many. Listening to a certain kind of music could increase your concentration at work. A recently published article stated that background music has actually the power to alter the listener’s mood.
If you are finding it difficult to be more focused at work, then ProofHub brings you 10 super-easy and super-effective ways to beat distractions and stay focused at work.