In this episode, we discuss the importance of focus.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista, where my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about focus. To succeed in today’s economy, you need to know how to focus on the right things. There is a great book by Cal Newport called “Deep Work” and you can accomplish a lot of amazing stuff and have a bunch of free time if you know how to do deep work.
One of the worst things that you can do is get distracted. When you get distracted from a task, it can take you up to 45 minutes to stop thinking about the previous task that you were working on. We as people, can’t multitask and it shows with this one exercise.
What I want you to do is to get a piece of paper and fold in half hot dog style, meaning you make the crease vertically so that you can rotate the piece of paper to landscape mode. Then in the upper quadrant, I want you to draw a line in the middle from edge to edge and do the same for the bottom quadrant.
So take some time and pause the podcast if you have a chance and I want you to write the numbers one through twenty-six on the top of the line in the top quadrant and then write a through z in the bottom of the quadrant and time yourself on how fast you can do it. A record at that time.
Now for the bottom quadrant, I want you to alternate between numbers and letters. A then 1, B then 2. and continue with this pattern until you reach 26 and Z. So you just go back and forth until you’re done. Now record your time for accomplishing this.
I did this exercise in the past and I think I as I was able to do the first part in around 45 seconds and the second one I was able to do in about a minute and ten seconds.
It’s hard for the brain to switch between tasks and we’re slow because we have mental residue from the last task, it’s not completely gone from our brain yet and were still thinking about it.
You can write a paper in an hour instead of four if you know how to focus real deeply for that hour where you get into the flow and you just crank out that paper. If you can save yourself three hours, just imagine what you can do for those three hours. You can meal prep, workout, catch-up with an old. You can do a lot.
We live in a very distracted world and the easiest thing to do as a human being is to get distracted. Being distracted is costing you a lot. This takes discipline and building up your focus muscle so that you fall into the trap of saying, it’s okay to check my phone, it’s okay to go check ESPN to see what is going on but that is costing you your productivity, which is then costing you your better life.
To help you stay focus, you need to know what you want to accomplish for the day. If you don’t know what you have to do for the day. Then anything can steal your attention because what else were you going to do. You had no plan and now you’re following somebody else’s agenda. When you follow somebody else’s agenda, you’re making their dream come true, not yours. So you need to guard your attention at all times.
The best way to keep your attention is to have strict boundaries for your work. Close the door, remove the phone, and don’t allow distractions. If somebody needs your attention, then tell them that you can address it in an hour if it’s not an emergency. This can save you so much time if you can create the perfect system. For me, I just do my writing, and if I write every day, then I’m going to get better at writing and I’m going to produce more work.
It takes 10,000 hours to become a master in a subject and the faster you can get the 10,000 hours the better you’re going to be off. You can do it in two years or 10 years, but if you can do it in two years, you will enjoy the benefit of making expert-level pay for 8 years and you can focus on other things in the meantime.
I feel like meditation really helps with focus because you get really good at removing unnecessary thoughts. Meditating is like a muscle that can get stronger with practice. You just close your eyes, focus on breathing six seconds in and then six-second our and you just repeat this for a minute. If a thought comes to your head, address and says that you will get to it later. The more you meditate, the better you will get at just focusing on your breath. I like meditating because you’re able to slow things down and not get overwhelmed by everything because you can remove the unnecessary things to focus on and just focus on what really matters.
If you focus on junk, you will become junk. If you focus on high-quality things, then you’ll become a person of high quality. We can’t be robots even though I have been accused of one but there are things that I have been distracted by like my phone and computer. Or a request to go out. You just have to make sure you did your work first and then go play. It’s a balance that you need to figure out for yourself but if you can focus and get into the flow of things, then you can accomplish a lot of things and give yourself the leisure you deserve without having to worry about what other things you have to do,
To summarize today’s episode, whoever can learn how to focus the best will win in today’s economy. There is a lot of noise out there and if you can learn how to focus on the signal and reach the signal, then you’ll make it far in life. If you can’t, then you’ll be doom to a life mediocrity.
Thanks for listening today’s episode.
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