Finding Focus – Health Now, Wealth Forever

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By Tom, on July 4th, 2014

One of the reasons I have been having such a hard time posting lately is a lack of focus. Focus is a fragile and limited resource. It can be shattered by the ring of a phone or beep of an email and then your idea is gone, your train of thought is derailed.

I used to be fairly proficient at finding a way to maintain my focus. Usually this was a matter of shutting myself in my room for an afternoon or staying up late, past the distractions that the others in my house cause. But, for many reasons, I have not been able to keep my focus intact. I’ve only been able to complete one post in the past six months.

I recently listened to a podcast that defined a few of our brains resources as limited non-renewable resources. These were willpower, time, and focus. I have written of will power before and time being limited is no secret. But Focus was a little less obvious to me.

When doing something creative, a distraction can cause you to lose 30 minutes or more as you try to find your way back to the path you were on.

If you are distracted by more than a couple choices when you’re trying to make a big decision, you will be less likely to make the correct decision, and more likely to regret your decision – even if it was the right one.

If you are given a critical piece of information on Friday and can’t act on it until Monday morning, your weekend will be ruined.

How can you keep your focus intact? My goal is to aggressively schedule time where I will be shut off from the world. I am thinking of getting a piece of software, like Freedom that blocks distractions while I work on the computer. And I am reading Getting Things Done, once again, to remind myself of how to focus.

What are some ways you maintain focus?