How to Un-distract Yourself and Get Productive
Information overload is becoming a cause of concern for many people whose brains are being affected, causing them to lose focus and become easily distracted, due to an overwhelming amount of data they receive on their electronic devices.
From notification fatigue to constant emails, DMs, text messages, shared stories and headlining news — Millennials and Generation Z are especially feeling the strain that information overload can put on their personal life, work, and education. This can affect anyone’s focus and productivity.
👇 Here are a few ways to turn off the noise and reduce bad habits that seek distractions, so that you can give your brain a break and recenter your focus.
Get Undistracted
1. Turn off your phone or put it on airplane mode and put it away where you cannot visibly see it.
When your phone is visible in your environment or is easy to reach, it tells your subconscious that you are open to becoming distracted by it. You don’t want this when you need to do deep work. So, put your phone away.
2. Use a Bullet Journal as a calendar to schedule your routine and to keep tabs of your tasks on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
As cliche and boring as it may seem for some of you to write down your tasks in a Bullet Journal, it is completely necessary for your brain to visually see what must be done for the day, week, or month. This will train yourself to keep track of activities, especially if it isn’t your nature to do so.
3. Put the Eisenhower Matrix to use so you can prioritize your tasks more efficiently. You can download an app such as Focus Matrix if you don’t want to draw one yourself.
The Eisenhower Matrix allows you to determine the importance and urgency of your tasks in four quadrants: important and urgent, important and not urgent, not important and urgent, not important and not urgent. This is a great way to prioritize your tasks in the proper order and to make better use of your time.
4. Use the Pomodoro technique (it basically uses a tomato kitchen timer) or download a timer app that works just like a Pomodoro such as the Flow app when you work on tasks.
The Pomodoro technique allows you to focus on a task until its completion without any distractions. You set the timer for 25 minutes, and once the time is up, you’ll set the timer again for a 5 minute break. This counts as one Pomodoro. By the time you have reached the fourth Pomodoro, your break time can be extended to 15-20 minutes. You continue repeating your Pomodoro until you complete a task.
5. Meditate in a quiet, comfortable place.
We could all use some quiet time to slow down our minds and turn off the noise. Silent sitting meditation is a great way to get started. Sit in a meditation posture with your back straight and eyes looking ahead of you about a foot from the ground, and just breathe normally. Focus on the flow of the air entering your lungs and exiting as you inhale and exhale. When a thought arises do not fight it, just observe it and return to your breath. Try it for 5 minutes at a time, and increase it for another 5 minutes when you’re ready to take it up another notch.
Summary
In our Information Age filled with so much technology and information coming at us at a rapid pace on a daily basis, it is very easy for our minds to become habituated to getting distracted.
This also makes us increasingly overwhelmed to a point we cannot seem to keep up with everything happening around us at once.
Once our brains have reached its maximum threshold, it can take a toll on our mental and physical health with the stress it takes on causing anxiety, brain fog, and lack of focus.
Luckily, there are ways to mitigate this by practicing any of the five tips shared.
