Build Your Focus by Getting Your Technology Use Under Control
Because digital dependence is the biggest attention-eroder out there, athletes work hard not to get sucked in. And your biggest opportunity for building your focus is to get a firm grip on your technology use.
Your Gadgets Are Designed to Be Addictive
The first step is acknowledging that your gadgets are designed to be addictive; thus, you are probably using them in ways that compromise your concentration. Then, you must examine your relationship with technology, eliminate what is not helpful, and, in a highly discerning manner, decide what you can take from it to make your life and work more satisfying and productive. For example, stop shopping online for the thrill and optimize that convenience by buying online only what you genuinely need and can’t find elsewhere; do play online games if that’s a recharging reward for you, but don’t play games as a way to procrastinate.
By exercising limits with technology, using what serves you, and letting the rest fall away, you will feel less intruded upon, freer to move, and better positioned to eliminate other, more internal distractions.
When an attorney tells me they don’t have time for anything but work, I ask them for a rundown of their technology use. I pose two questions to them:
- How much of your technology use helps you to be happier and more productive?
- How much of your technology use is detrimental?
At first, they insist their relationship with technology is all good: scrolling through Instagram helps them feel connected, responding to the phone whenever it rings is part of being an attorney, and watching Netflix is a great way to unwind. When I push attorneys further, though, they are dismayed to realize that looking at social media is creating a sense of isolation over connection, being literally “on call” throughout the day is curtailing the deep thought necessary for providing worthwhile legal assistance, and TV is more numbing than it is relaxing. When they think about it, activities involving technology, if not chosen and managed with an eye for the perfect synthesis of gratification and industriousness, steal not only attention but a whole lot of fulfillment.
Reducing Technology Use Will Free Up Your Calendar
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, by reducing your technology use to only what truly pleases and propels you, you could free up your calendar for all those things you say you don’t have room for?
Be matter-of-fact with yourself about how much technological involvement is unnecessary and getting in the way of attaining what you really want. Because technology is so insidious, seducing you away from what’s important without you even realizing it sometimes, robbing you from right under your nose, you need to take complete charge of your attention span and wrest back control. The bottom line is that you can’t research meticulously, craft bulletproof legal arguments, think on your feet in the courtroom, or meet other tough calls of lawyering if you’re just partially paying attention.
Once you take full responsibility for what you focus on, ignoring everything not truly relevant to you and your goals, you will work more efficiently with higher mental acuity, and the appealing by-product will be a looser schedule. University College Dublin cognitive psychology professor Aidan Moran compared this kind of attentional command, which professional athletes possess, to a spotlight that you can put where you want and never lose.
How to Channel Your Awareness More Deliberately for a Healthier Attention Span
Sigmund Freud was a bit eccentric, but one thing he got undeniably right is that human beings go to impressive lengths to avoid truths they do not want to accept. The longer you dodge inconvenient truths, the more wherewithal you must put into repressing and denying what is happening, and the fewer inner resources you have for making the most of the moment you’re in. You can be considerably less stressed by acknowledging any realities, such as relationship, health, and financial problems that you’re pushing out of your awareness and then bringing them to the surface where you can responsibly address them.
Practice Sensible Multitasking
Most of us learn from ample life experience that giving our full attention to two demanding activities simultaneously is not feasible. We know quite well that we pick up only fractured pieces and don’t integrate the whole of anything when we dilute our regard like that, but we prefer to buy into the myth that we can do everything at once.
The smartest attorneys know that stretching attention too thin to finish things faster ultimately wastes time due to all the mistakes and missed details you have to follow up on later. Multitasking can be effective, but only when you do it sensibly by blending two low-focus activities, such as returning social texts while standing in line at the grocery store or listening to an audiobook while cleaning your workspace.
Deal with Your Baggage
Another attention sapper you may not be cognizant of is unresolved business from your past. It could be childhood trauma you haven’t sufficiently worked through, an apology you haven’t made, a grievance you haven’t dropped, or something crucial you haven’t explored. Whatever it is, I promise you that it is weakening your focus on what’s in front of you now. Once you start to deal with it—whether that means calling a friend, booking an appointment with a therapist, or writing a letter—doing so will let you put down whatever is haunting you so that you can operate from a more present place more often.
Get Rid of Clutter
A major source of distraction in our high-consumption culture is stuff: actual tangible items and the flow of information that never stops coming and keeps piling up. All that stuff takes up a lot of room and can be quite distracting. So, if you want a clear head, clear out the items occupying too much space in your life. By removing obstacles blocking your success, you will feel less constricted and maneuver beyond what is cramping your style.
Take Care of Petty Annoyances
The small things nagging at us, all those pesky errands, little loose ends, and minor chores, add up and get in the way of our day. While there are some solutions we can’t rush in life, we can quickly reduce distraction by ticking off those seemingly weightless to-do-list items.
Drop Commitments No Longer Serving You
Perhaps you joined a certain professional committee out of passion, and now you’ve lost interest. Or maybe you used to look forward to having lunch with a college friend once every month, but now that seems like too much. In a continuously changing culture, with new ideas constantly making their way into your consciousness, you are bound to outgrow things. Any guilt you feel about that is just preventing you from going forward with whatever more appealing pursuit is calling you. The more you eliminate the commitments you’ve moved beyond, the more tuned in you will be with what matters most to you today.
How to Optimize Your Focus with Strategies Used by Professional Athletes
Ground Yourself in Your Senses
Your capacity to converge resolutely on your work can be fortified by going deep in other ways when you’re not working. This means getting out of your thinking brain and delving under surface distractions into activities that absorb you on a substantial level. Beach volleyball Olympian Lauren Fendrick likes to escape the ceaseless cacophony of everyday life by going into the sensations of cooking while listening to music. Reaching that deeper, more pleasing place can happen by simply stopping what you’re doing and asking yourself randomly: what am I feeling, seeing, smelling, hearing, or tasting right now? When you regularly expand your involvement with whatever is happening, noticing textures, colors, aromas, and sounds, you will be less inclined to skate from one disruption to the next.
Meditate
Kobe Bryant swore by disciplined meditation, saying, “If I don’t do it, it feels like I’m constantly chasing the day, as opposed to dictating the day.” Let me assure you that meditation is not a one-hour-a-day thing that involves sitting on a mat with your legs crossed, entirely emptying your mind, and feeling utterly at peace. No matter what you may have heard, evacuating your head—for a species noted for its capacity to analyze—is totally impossible and not the point anyway.
The goal of meditation, which can be accomplished just about anywhere in as little as a few minutes a few times a week, is to get outside the racket of your busy life, close your eyes, and simply step back and observe your thinking. Whether your thoughts are racing or drifting or doing somersaults, it’s by merely witnessing them that you begin to see that you have no control over your thoughts, but you are a decision-maker separate from your thoughts, and so you do get to decide how (or how not) to respond to them.
As you increasingly see from meditation that your thoughts can do whatever they want and you don’t need to answer to all of them, you begin to feel more in charge when you're out in the world.
Let Your Mind Roam
With all this emphasis on eliminating distractions for the sake of laser focus, it’s wise to note that your brain needs time off between periods of prolonged concentration to rest. Breaking away from deep work has the huge benefit of getting your head out of routine thinking patterns so that new neural connections—thoughts veering from regular routes and combining in innovative and imaginative ways—get formed. While intense work is necessary to get things done, surprisingly amazing ideas come up when you shower, wander through a museum, or walk in the woods. Professional skydiver Roberta Mancino steps off the tightrope of concentration by swimming in the ocean. How can you let your own mind drift?
If You Are Disorganized No Matter What You Do, Consult a Specialist
If you find as you aim to remove distractions from your life that there is still never enough time, your mind is always jumping around, and you have trouble focusing and finishing things, it could be that you have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I say could be with caution because ADHD is way overdiagnosed in our current culture, where the speed of life and the perpetual presence of technology keep most of us from being present. In most cases, you can be more focused by trying what I’ve suggested. But if it’s all to no avail, and you are disorganized no matter what you do or where you are, then I recommend you call your primary care physician and ask to be referred to a specialist for an assessment.
