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Chapter 4: How to Will Yourself to Focus

Pursuing Single Tasks and Improving Productivity

Multi-tasking is often associated with being productive, but now it has become a way of life. It’s not really a productive way of working. For one, it makes you inefficient for having to switch between tasks. It can complicate things, as you suffer from stress and commit errors. It can also make you insane as you deal with the chaos of multi-tasking, when your brain is designed only to handle one thing.

That’s why it’s best to settle with single tasks. Your mind will be focused on one thing and one thing alone. Imagine how joyful it would be to savor one task, such as reading a novel, eating breakfast, or spending time with your family.

This will also benefit you in that you can focus better, improve your effectiveness, develop your expertise in what you do, and produce quality work. It also feels good to lose yourself in something that you feel is worth doing.

You can lead a life full of single tasks by doing these things:

* Be aware of the things that you are doing, right from when you start doing it. Stop yourself from switching to another thing.

Eliminate distractions. If you’re going to research, focus on it alone. If you’re going to read a book, do nothing except read the book.

Choose your tasks wisely. Always ask yourself “Am I doing something worthwhile?” If not, proceed with the important tasks.

Pour your everything into the task at hand. If you’re going to talk with friends, talk and listen. If you’re going to lose weight, eat healthy and exercise as much as you can.

Practice. Once you get your drive going, practice it every single day until you’re good at it.

But how can you boost your productivity if you choose single tasks?

Choose only the biggest and most important tasks every day, the ones that you really need to finish to create an impact on your work and life in general.

Don’t go straight to your distractions first thing in the morning. Instead, prepare a to-do list.

Get rid of distractions.

Finish your tasks one by one.

Stop yourself when you feel the temptation to check your inbox or log into your social network accounts.

Don’t stop doing the most important tasks until they’re done.

Take note of things that you can’t do now or think of doing later so you won’t forget them.

Take a break and de-stress by breathing deeply in and out.

Benefits of Smaller Work Focus

Granted that you now know a bit about how to focus, you still have a lot of work to do. For starters, you need to narrow down your focus.

It’s not right to work with a broad focus. This could be overcommitting to too many projects at once, trying to please all of your customers, doing everything for everybody, being available for contact all the time in both online and offline channels, and more.

Instead, you need to narrow your focus by identifying your priorities. Let go of one unnecessary task at a time. Do less. Include fewer features. Learn to say no to some people’s requests. Accept that you can’t please everybody. Focus on fewer things, things that do matter.

How to Focus on Reading and Research

You can do more work, especially with work that involves a lot of reading and research, if you know how to avoid distractions when you’re reading. So, how can you focus on long blogs or articles?

To finish long reading materials without being interrupted frequently, put your reading material in a separate window without any other tabs open. Expand that window to cover the rest of the screen and show the blog or article on your computer screen alone. Don’t switch to other windows or programs until you’re done reading.

Do the same thing with books. Hold your book and put your computer, laptop or any other mobile device out of your sight. Read in a quiet place and enjoy the experience.

When you do research, don’t open your emails, social networks, and irrelevant windows, tabs or programs. Search about the topic that you’re interested in and open the web pages that you found. Skim these pages and open the relevant links. Repeat these with the new online sources. Open all the necessary articles then read them one by one. Take notes after reading each article and bookmark some. This will help you focus when you do research, despite being online.
Benefits of Walking on Disconnection and Focus

Did you know that you can boost your productivity immensely by walking, aside from staying healthy and slim?

You can follow this walking routine to help you regain your focus:

Walk for about 30 minutes to a destination - a library, park, coffee shop, or cafe. Don’t connect online.

Read or work for 40 minutes, from writing and reading to taking notes or responding to emails. You can insert some snacking in there too.

Repeat this schedule.

Walking and disconnecting are worth trying because you can refocus and can think better after sitting all day long. It will also help you clear your head, enjoy what nature has to offer, and take a break from stress. It will even help you improve physically. After walking, you’ll know how to focus on work again and waste less time on distractions.

Chapter 5: How People with Various Roles Can Focus

How Parents Can Find Focus

A parent’s life is never quiet! You have kids demanding, screaming, squealing, crying, and playing at home, so it’s even more difficult for parents to find focus and peace of mind.

One way to get focus to work for your life as parents is to separate your roles. Assign them to different days or weeks and focus on each role one at a time. For instance, you have to wake up early in the morning before the kids wake up and focus on yourself. Run, jog, walk, read a book, do yoga, or indulge in your creative side by drawing or writing.

Once the kids wake up, prepare them for school while you prepare for work, pack lunches, and more. But this time, focus on being a parent and give time to talk to your kids.

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Chapter 7: The Trick Is in Avoiding the Wrong Things

Summary

Avoidance is the best way to keep stress-free. Keep away from all those stress-boosters and you will have busted it already!

The Trick Is in Avoiding the Wrong Things

Temptation is a very easy thing to happen to everyone. It seems very appealing at the start, but very soon it begins showing its true colors. That is when you see that you cannot tackle it all that simply. That is when the stress begins to creep in.

Just take a very simple example, which most of us will easily relate with. Think about a delicious gourmet delight. You know that it will be great to eat but at the same time you know that it is laden with calories. Very few people can avoid such a treat. They will very likely gobble it. They will become uncontrollable whenever any such food comes their way. The result is that they start piling on weight. Health problems begin to raise their ungainly head.

But if you had made it a point to avoid the sinful food right from the start, all these problems of obesity and the related issues including the high stress would not have arisen at all. Today you are dealing with the stress that you have become overweight and that weight does not dwindle, but had you learnt the fine art of avoiding things, you would have been in much better shape today. This stress that you currently have would not have been a part and parcel of your life.

Temptations come in our way in various forms. Food is just a very simple example; it can come in our way in various complicated manners. A raise for a difficult job is an example. The job given to you is difficult, you know that you aren't capable of it but still you didn't avoid taking the job. You plunged headlong into it, with the lucre of the added money and the chance to rise above the competition. But just because you didn't say "no" to something you know wouldn't be able to accomplish.

Saying "no" is a fine art. You have to be firm in your decision but at the same time be polite and gentle. It is always best to speak about your own limitation when you are refusing something. If you do that, you assure the person that nothing is wrong with their offer. You are leaving the gate open for them to return with something that better suits your mutual equation.

Chapter 8: Looking for Relaxation Techniques

Summary

Various relaxation techniques exist for stress management, and they really work.

Looking for Relaxation Techniques

For most people, stress management means to use a relaxation technique. Relaxation in itself is a way of working out your stress. When we are stressed, the level of hormones in our body increases. Under periods of extreme stress, three main hormones are released in a high amount - cortisol, norepinephrine and the growth hormone. As long as the level of these hormones is high, we continue to be under stress. The one sure way to relieve ourselves of the onslaught of stress is to bring the level of these hormones back to normal. This is achieved through using the right relaxation techniques. That is the reason we called relaxation "unwinding" - we are bringing hormonal levels back to what they were initially.

There are several relaxation techniques available to us today. Here we discuss some of the most conventional and effective ones.

Yoga

Yoga has received an important place in the world's health scenario today. You could make use of this ancient Indian science as well. Through the use of various bodily stances, known as asanas, yoga tries to act on various energy points of the body. It releases the latent energies of the body and makes it more energetic, fitter and much healthier. The popularity of yoga has reached into the West a long time ago and now it is very easy to find books, videos, manuals and a lot other educational stuff on how to perform these techniques. Yoga could very well be your ticket out of the persistent stress that's playing on your mind.

Breathing Exercises

Breathing works because you are channelizing a flow of healthy oxygen into your lungs, which is then carried over by the bloodstream to different organs of the body, including the brain. There are various kinds of breathing exercises advised, some of which can give quick relief to the person using them. Check out these breathing exercises on the Internet, or visit your local bookstore to find a lot of books written by expert authors who write on health and fitness.

Meditation

Since stress is a mental problem, meditation can work wonders. The right meditation - whatever form of it you practice - can free your mind from its excess baggage and make it work optimally. Meditation can be practiced anywhere and there are only a few things that are needed in order to perform it effectively. Like the other two methods, there is a lot of information available on meditative processes as well.

Chapter 9: Prioritizing

Summary

If you always keep in mind that Wednesday precedes Thursday, you will be fine.

Prioritizing

A lot of our problems can be solved only if we would learn how to prioritize things. Our lives aren't simple, linear things. There are various intersections, crossroads, junctions and forks as we travel on the path called life. There will be various places where we will have to choose between two or sometimes several options. We will have to decide what we must do in precedence to others. There will be moral, social, familial and personal dilemmas and we will be torn by different emotions at the same time, making it quite difficult for us to choose what to do first.

The first important step for you to realize in such circumstances is that you are just one individual; it is impossible for you to do several things simultaneously. You might be able to multitask a bit, but you cannot do it with a lot of tasks at once and you certainly cannot do it all the time.

This is where you need to prioritize. When you realize that you aren't physically or mentally capable of doing everything that life sets up in your platter, you will be happier and much more at ease with the fact that you have to do things on a priority basis.