So far in the last five articles I have pointed out to you the reason for your poor concentration and limited ability to focus on single tasks. If you follow the advice in this article alone, you may just regain enough attention span to go back and read them!
The internet is a wonderful thing, especially to people like me who grew up at a time when it was hard to even imagine why an individual would want to use a computer let alone own one.
However it can also be a bad thing, as overuse can lead to a severely impaired ability to concentrate on long, difficult tasks. So the question is; how do you still get all the benefit of the internet, without becoming some kind of human goldfish with a memory-span of 3 seconds.
sidenote: This refers to a popular myth made up to make people feel better about keeping goldfish in tiny round bowls. There is zero evidence to suggest they have 3 second memories.
Time Discipline
Do you have one or more kids? If not; were you a child yourself once?
I thought so!
The reason I ask is because most children when they are growing up have certain boundaries set for them by the adults who look after and teach them.
A responsible parent will not just allow their child to eat sweets from morning to night, they will also make sure they stay washed and clean, and won't (or at least shouldn't) let their child watch as much TV as they please.
Instead we create little time blocks for our children, we say things like they can watch TV for an hour after they've done their homework. Or at a friend's party we might relax and let them eat what they want for a couple of hours.
Whatever the activity, if we know that tOo much exposure to it will cause ill effects, we ration it out. We do this because we are adults whom have greater reasoning skills than the children in our care.
So we now have to do that to ourselves, you have to be your own parent; let's take a look at how.
Time Blocks
I read a book recently called Deep Work by Cal Davenport, an MIT computer scientist who has turned skill of extreme concentration into an art form.
Having been on my own quest to increase my focus, I was intrigued to know what Davenport did in order to become so mega effective (he's written a gazillion books in a very short space of time, whilst being a full time professor at one of the best universities in the world).
Davenport suggests blocking your time on the internet, this is so simple, yet so revolutionary. If you are like most people, you turn on your computer in the morning, whether it be at work or home, and then turn it off when you leave for work/go to bed.
It is always on, there for you to leap onto at a moment's notice.
When you sit there with the internet open and you don't have any thing specific, all you are doing is giving yourself infinite chances to get distracted.
If you work in an office, do you leave games running on your phone just in case you want to play it at a moment's notice? Or do you store your phone away in your desk till lunch/home time?
So why would you do the same with the internet?
Let's look at a couple of scenarios, because I reckon you could be sitting there thinking, 'yeah, that's not practical for me, I always have to be online'.
Scenario 1: The Office Administrator - Their duties include liaising with management, pulling reports and files from archives and making them available. Around fifty people have their email address and they send and receive at least forty-five emails per day.
Typically this person leaves their Outlook email client open on their desktop as they work. As emails come in they respond to almost all of them immediately, this causes them to frequently pause what they are doing.
- Alternative - This person, let's call her Sue, decides one day to change her working methodology. She sets up a responder email that says the following:
*Hello this is Sue, I am online to check emails four times per day between 10-11 14:00-15:00, 16:00-16:30 and then for a final check at 17:30.
If your email is urgent and requires an immediate mission-critical response, whereby a disaster can be averted by you speaking to me within 5 minutes. Please ring my extension.
For matters whereby you need reports or presentations within 24 hours, these will be dealt within my last online session. All sales and accounting matters shall be dealt with in the morning and afternoon sessions.
Thank you for your understanding, and you shall receive a reply at the next appropriate time slot.
BOOM!
That, or a version of that is something that no reasonable colleague or boss can argue with. Any boss asking why you're doing this, you simply reply so that I can focus on the most important work you pay me for, and I cannot do that if I'm responding to emails.
Since Sue gets into the office at 8:30, she makes sure she does not go online till 10:00. This way she gets to tie up the loose ends from the night before and gets to concentrate without interruption.
After not too long, everyone is in sync with Sue's working day, thus nobody sends her mission-critical emails unless there has been a phone conversation about it first.
Crucially everyone knows if they email Sue at say 11:30 that she won't respond to them till at least 14:00. In fact this will drastically cut the amount of needless emails she receives because before her new schedule, anyone with anything slightly on their mind would rattle off an email to Sue, which she would respond to.
Now however, people are a lot more considered about their mails, as they know that there will be a stack of mails to answer in any of these given periods, ergo they know that frivolous and lazy mails will at best ignored for days.
Scenario 2: The Homeworker & Home-based Entrepreneur - Even though these two types of people have different pressures and motivations, they are together because they both work from home.
Using internet time blocks is especially important in this scenario, because there are no prying eyes checking what you're up to. Thus it is not unheard of for homeworkers and entrepreneurs to goof off on Facebook and personal emails rather than getting some quality work done.
This time they may not need a responder email, though the homeworker might want to clarify their working structure to their bosses and stakeholders, when they're not in the office.
What is important when you're at home is to set internet times, and then stick to them using two simple rules.
Make each session a maximum of 90 minutes
Set an alarm to remind you of your time, and logoff within 2 MINUTES MAXIMUM of hearing that alarm.
FAQs
- My work is online and I often have to jump on at a moment's notice; how can I create internet blocks and stick to them?
First of all, analyse if your work really is online. For instance I write pretty much full time for Steemit, and you may class that as online work. But the reality is when I'm writing I'm offline, if I need to research a subject and I'm not in my internet time block, I make a note and research it when I am.
Secondly, analyse if you really do have to jump on at a moment's notice, or you're just doing that because you believe it's expected of you. Try setting up some responder emails that explain that you are not contactable 24/7 online, and then provide emergency numbers.
Then (very importantly) specify in the response exactly what constitutes a real emergency, that way nobody is ever disappointed not to get an immediate response.
Lastly the way to stick to internet blocks is pure and simple, you must plan your working day. The more you structure it, the less room for frivolous distractions there are.
- How many internet time blocks should I have and how long should they be?
This will depend entirely on the type of work you do, if you are a kind of self-contained worker, whereby you don't really have to interact with that many people during the day, you won't need as much as somebody who needs to maintain some level of connectivity.
If you are somebody who uses the internet to research the subjects you are working on, then separate your research blocks from your work blocks.
So for example you may set up a research block at 9:00 every morning which lasts for 90 minutes.
Then you take a coffee break till 11:00 and then start work using the research you've just garnered. If you find there are holes which you need to fill, make notes and work on as much as you can.
Your next block could then be at 2:30 that afternoon, whereby you'll fill in the holes from the morning, and do whatever it is you have to do with the rest of the time.
Doing this will make you super efficient, and will increase your planning skills.
Remember the key is to be flexible, if you feel you need ten, fifteen minute sessions throughout the day, or longer sessions in the morning, that's fine, the point is to get you to plan out your internet use and program your mind that the internet is somewhere you go to get something achieved, not just to goof around aimlessly looking for something to click or scroll.
OK FOLKS, HOPEFULLY I'VE COVERED IT ALL HERE, ANY MORE QUESTIONS OR ISSUES WITH FOCUS AND CONCENTRATION YOU HAVE, PLEASE DON'T HESITATE TO LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Related Articles:
Lessons In Concentration - How To Use A Smartphone
Incredible You! - A Superpower You Can Learn
Incredible You! - A Superpower You Can Learn - Part 2 Beating Distraction
Incredible You! - A Superpower You Can Learn - Part 3 - Mind Training
Incredible You! - A Superpower You Can Learn - Part 4 - Improving Concentration Via Memory
Title image: by rawpixel on Unsplash