Hack Your Focus and Get More Stuff Done

Staying focused quickly becomes one of the most significant challenges online marketers face today. For example, you sit down to write an article and end up surfing the net for the rest of the morning… Or you’ve got an information product you need to finish. Still, you check your email, which leads to a news site, a sports site, a few entertainment sites, and some social media sites, and before you know it, it’s already 3 hours later, and you’ve accomplished nothing except making yourself feel guilty. Does this sound familiar?

According to Dr. B. J. Fogg, Director of Stanford Persuasive Lab, “There’s just one way to change your behavior radically, and that’s to change your environment radically.”

Students who transfer to a new university are much more likely to change their habits than students who remain at the same university. This is true for workers as well. People who change jobs or job locations are much more likely to change their habits.

It makes sense. At your previous job, you were in the habit of going to a fast-food restaurant with your coworkers for lunch. At your new job, your coworkers eat lunch at a healthy restaurant and invite you along. Soon you are eating healthy lunches every day, even when you don’t go to that restaurant, because you’re now in the habit of eating healthful lunches. Enough time goes by, and fast food can even become repulsive to you.

So what happened? Your environment changed, and so did the triggers. This made it easy to effect a change.

People who have trouble falling asleep are told only to use their beds for sleeping and nothing else. If they lay down but can’t fall asleep, they should get up and go to another room. After treating their bed as only a sleep location (and not a reading location, a daydreaming location, etc.) for several weeks, they can generally fall asleep within minutes of their head hitting the pillow.

The bed is now a trigger for just one thing – sleeping.

This is why having one location to work and another place to play is essential. If you are mixing your ‘play’ time with your work time in the same home office, you’re asking to get constantly distracted.

This is easily remedied if you use a laptop or tablet for work. Designate one place in your home where you will make nothing but work – no exceptions.

If you work on a desktop computer, you might consider getting a laptop or tablet for your Internet ‘playtime.

Another technique is to designate specific times of the day when you are working, with no exceptions. This will get you in the habit of always doing work during those times, making it much more challenging to get distracted. Your work times become routine, eliminating the need to decide if you will work each time. And when you automatically go to work instead of ‘deciding’ to go to work, you eliminate the possibility that you will decide NOT to work.

A third technique is to use triggers. For example, if you always start work right after breakfast, eating and going to work will become a habit. You don’t have to think about it; you do it.

In one study, knowing exactly when and where participants were going to exercise caused them to follow through a whopping 91% of the time. Those who exercised when they felt motivated exercised 35% of the time.

Bottom line: If you’re having trouble staying focused, designate an area where you will do nothing but work, combine it with a strict schedule, and you should experience a dramatic increase in your productivity.

When you get more done with fewer distractions, you’ll accomplish your goals faster – researchers tell us you’ll also enjoy increased self-esteem, greater happiness, and overall satisfaction with your life.