In a landscape full of distractions, what distinguishes those who stick to their long-term goals and achieve them from those who fail? The best workers are not necessarily those with superhuman powers of concentration, but those who have developed habits to safeguard their attention and pace it to essential tasks. The trick to focus is building an environment and a set of habits that generate natural concentration, rather than fighting to hold off the distraction.
Know what you’re after (and how to get there) and others will be beaten to the punch. Top performers don’t crave indeterminate dead ends. They have an extremely internalized sense of why a specific goal even exists. An immediate sense of why is an emotional anchor for those already using their neurology to build momentum. If there exists an attachment to a specific mission or principle bigger-than-YOU, your mind monitors the environment for relevant signals and notices (and blocks out) irrelevant signals. Rather than simply craving to build a business, an A++ entrepreneur might locate that growth in the freedom it will give his family, or the positive change it will make in the world. This emotional security shifts the focus from a matter of will power to a matter of IDENTITY.
Once you’re clear on what you want, the next step is to take your goal and break it into its most immediate, manageable components. An enormous goal in all of its mammoth glory will make your mind feel mush and cause you to delay, status quo is tempting. The truly successful are experts in chunking – taking that ten year aspire and tabulating it into yearly mile stones, quarterly projects, weekly chores, and everyday non-negotiables. If you knew that you already 1 or 2 things you should be doing this morning to hyper-success would you get out of bed? They stay stuck in a continual process of forward momentum and growth and that idea is very self-sustaining. When your path is broken into manageable chunks there is also less decision fatigue because you are not wasting energy bickering over the next move.
One is not about NOT being distracted. One is about having structure. High performers has created rigidity systems and rituals for their focus. They smother “time” as if it were precious raw material and schedule their “deep work” hour like a date with the most important customer. Executing without compromise, without distraction-proof even for one business, perfectly streamlined goal for which one is one hundred percent responsible. Many learned to work according to their biological rhythm, reserving the “most cognitively demanding work” for when they have the greatest energy and saving the sheafs of “administrative work” during the troughs. They are focused doing the scheduled habit not the mood-dependent procedure. And they create the plan and do it without the daily debate with laziness.
It is also important to manage your attentional environment as aggressively as a managed one. Successful people know that today’s world is designed to distract them and manipulate their attention, so they redesign their surroundings to make distraction either physically impossible or psychologically invisible, or both. They turn off all notifications that are not absolutely necessary, move apps that might tempt them to their farthest pages and put their work areas in places that force the brain to focus. They even leverage the power of strategic absence-the rigorous choice to ignore opportunities, demands and information that are not related to the defined focus of the moment. When they say yes to a distraction, they recognize that that is the same as saying no to their future. They defend their time with a subtlety that can be mistaken as mechanical but is really merciless.
And it is not just about control over the environment. There is some profound psychological training involved here, the capacity for suffering. Deep focus is hard on the mind, and pretty mind numbing in the short-term. A typical mind will seek to reduce the dullness of that situation with denser, more immediate hits of dopamine through social media, default explorations, etc. But a mindset trained to handle this will be happy to sit patiently through the dullness. Recognising that the urge to flee, is just that – an urge, and not a command that must be obeyed. While training these muscles over time, minds develop a resistance to mental fatigue that would make sustained periods of deep work much more feasible. You build this deep work muscle by mindfulness practice, meditative probing or simply through the regularity of doing deep work.
The other central feature of focus is reflection and recovery. Nobody can keep eyes-on like laser for six or more hours a day. Effective performers figure out how to schedule down time where they can walk around with their cell phone across their chest or stare out the window or settle into a hobby that uses the hands but has no demands on thinking. The downtime enables the default mode network of the brain to take a breather and fire up important neurotransmitters, supporting down time. They will also reflect on what they are doing..not to worry if they haven’t achieved what they set out to, but to make sure what they are doing is actually related to what they set out to achieve. Their weekly review.
Ultimately, the most effective people do not let the focus fast become frozen; they develop focus as a renewable practice, and when they do drift, they do not punish themselves, or paint themselves as lazy and undisciplined. They recognize the drift when it occurs, they forgive themselves for the lapses, they get back into their system in a matter of moments. That ability to turn right around to restarting the machinery before a single distracted afternoon spirals into a year of impeded progress is precisely what limits one less-than-perfect day from becoming a year of a lack of progress. They can maintain perspective enough to see that the process of focusing step by step is a series of wins, where every single purposeful inhale, every deliberate switch of attention back to the conscious task at hand is a victory. Achievers take care of what it takes to keep focus flowing consistently toward what matters, so that their focus always flows toward what they most want.
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