Tell me if you can relate to this?

You had every intention to get one important task completed today. But urgent emails, impromptu meetings, the constant distraction of notifications and a tired brain after too much screen time last night had you choosing easier tasks all day. When you finally got to the one important task, the day was wrapping up. It wasn’t your best work so you’ll have to look at it again tomorrow.

And now you find yourself sitting on the couch watching a show with your partner, yet simultaneously catching up on social media posts, news, sports or other updates, all the while feeling that nagging stress of knowing you’re still accountable for that work.

Sound familiar? Can you relate? And this was you before COVID-19 added to the mix of compelling distractions and worries, which has only amplified everything.

When I ask people “How are you doing with respect to finding focus these days?”, I can feel the enormity of the challenge they are facing. Distraction is becoming the new normal. We’re even distracted in our downtime!

What’s the Problem?

Connecting with colleagues, friends and family has never been easier. This is good – right?

Media and news have never been more abundant, easier to access or as entertaining as it is today. What’s not to like?

Creating your own content has never been easier; each of us can now publish, post and upload everything from comments to blogs to movies. So, what’s the problem?

That’s the problem! It is all too easy, abundant and entertaining.

We forget that our attention is limited and what we give it to ultimately decides where and how we are spending our life. As Matthew Crawford stated so eloquently:

“Attention is a resource – a person only has so much of it.”

We also overlook what living in continuous partial attention does to our focus habits, our relationships and how it affects our moods. What seems like a way of staying on top of everything, ultimately fragments and fractures our ability to experience life. It leaves us feeling unsettled and ironically, going back to distractions in an attempt to feel better.

And we forget that the time and attention allocated to these activities came from somewhere; often time we previously gave to having greater depth and focus at work, or more connected conversations with our friends and family, or more sleep, or fully absorbed reading, or learning a new hobby, or mastering an old hobby, or exercise, or importantly – just having some much needed downtime at the end of a busy day to allow our brain time to reset for tomorrow.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Just like overeating, I believe we can have too much of good thing when it comes to consuming digitally. We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking we need to stay on top of all of it, and that the bottomless digital world is simply benign entertainment.

Know the Game You are Playing

In his book Indistractable, Nir Eyal puts it this way, “we naively believe that we are just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods.” The reality is that our attention is being manipulated more than we realize. The technology companies know far more about your brain than you do. They understand the precise evolutionary vulnerabilities in your brain and have become masters of how to exploit them (aka make the user experience highly engaging and enjoyable). There is a fine line between ‘highly enjoyable’ and ‘addictive’, and most of us can feel our brain dancing that line! And much of the time we simply lack the internal willpower to resist these temptations.

So, What Can You Do?

It comes down to each of us making some key decisions – “How important is it that I manage my attention?” and “What type of person do I want to be: distracted or intentional?”

Choose. Make a conscious choice to take back control of your attention. This is a choice that only you can make. Choose to finish writing one email before flitting off to something else. Choose what you need to focus on most at work – and stay with it. Choose to put away your phone let yourself be engrossed in a conversation, a TV show or a good book - and let that experience be enough.
Delete, turnoff, unsubscribe, manage your external distractions. Our digital distractions are particularly tempting, so win the war without fighting – turn it off! Turn off or remove all but your most critical notifications and updates. Starve your distractions. Feed your focus.
Practice JOMO/POMO. Reacquaint yourself with the word “No!” and give yourself the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO) or the Permission of Missing Out (POMO). And experience the joy of doing one thing at a time fully.

“The ability to choose cannot be taken away or even given away – it can only be forgotten!”

Greg McKeown, Essentialism – The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

See if you can pick ONE idea from this post and act on it. This will be hard but also very liberating. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will provide more information, tips and strategies to change our behaviour.

Conclusion

We forget that our attention is one of our most precious resources. It essentially determines how we spend our life. Big dollars are spent to grab and hold our attention. And the sheer abundance of choice we have in our world today can overwhelm our attentional space.

The question is: who do you want to be? Someone whose precious attention flits around and is easily grabbed by every thought you have or every distraction you hear or see? Or someone who chooses intentionally and mindfully where you place your attention, and thus how you live your life? This is probably one of the most important questions facing each of us as we march through our days. Attention truly is a resource!

I hope these ideas help you. I also know that changing our behaviour is hard. Often very hard. So, if you are tired of the way your brain is working and this is important to you, that’s where I come in.

I coach amazing people like you to delete the overwhelm, discern what matters most and drive your future. Schedule a FREE consultation with me HERE if you want to explore what life would be like for you with a more resilient brain and more masterful habits.

Please comment and share your tips on how you feed your focus and starve your distractions. We all benefit when we share and learn from each other.