How to fight everyday distractions and develop inner focus

Inner “Focus”

Fighting Distractions

Reading time ~ 6 min.

What’s Inside ?

• A post about fighting everyday distractions and keeping focus

• Interesting “thing” of the week

We live in the “Age of information”, it is a boon and equally a bane. Lets find out how in today’s edition.

The world of yesterday

Imagine the day and life of a World of 30 years ago - your parent’s generation. It was quite different.

Newspaper was delivered once a day and evening news were the primary source of socio-political information, the one that shapes our everyday decisions. One had to wait for the “special edition of newspaper” delivered in the evening to know the results of your examination or about something that impacts ones lives - results of a political election.

Even for personal communication, not everyone had the luxury of a personal telephone which enables a voice communication between two people separated by long distance. The people who could afford this luxury, were still restricted by the costs of such communication, so it remained a means of conveying only the vital information. Post cards, which inevitably were the means of transferring everyday information had a problem - they always took time to arrive at the destination.

Communication between people from different countries was almost a dream, only a prerogative to the privileged few.

Perhaps this was the reason, people took joy when meeting in person and tool pleasure knowing real people. If it took time, money and effort to meet your friend/relative, you would cherish/assign importance to it and you would ensure you spend quality time with them.

Current situation

In today’s world, we are surrounded and overwhelmed by many kinds of information. We no longer have to wait for a newspaper/special bulletin to know important information, we get that over our tips. We don’t have to wait for postman to arrive with a post card or hold the luxury of a landline phone - we have it on our tips.

We carry our “phones/tablets” with us which keep us connected every second of our life to the things, not just around us, but to the entire world. This is a great power that people from yesterday could only wish for. However are we using this right ? is it benefitting us enough ?

The answer is a strong no.

This huge amount of information is overwhelming us. Metaphorically, we are receiving a large amount of “noise” and only a little “music“ that actually benefits us. We are bombarded with information from a number of sources, there is huge competition from the richest, powerful entities on the planet to get your attention for their “products“. The products are being designed with best minds to make them more appealing, more enticing and more connected to you.

This means it is very difficult to “unplug” oneself from this huge generator of information repository around us. You can’t do this just like your everyday business. Just as there is huge effort to keep you glued, you should equally put more effort to keep away from this “distractions“.

How to fight distractions ?

Here are some tips that you can use to fight distractions

Tip 1: Establish a “Why“ - The purpose

While it is very important to be connected to the world around us, it is important to set a limit and the question that can help you to do it is “Why“ ?

Every Device, application, activity that you include in your life needs to have a reason - Why do you need it ? Define a purpose of “why” you need it.

Ex: Your friend introduced you to a new mobile application - he/she likes it and it is an absolute smash hit among your friends, before you go and download it, pause and ask yourself a question - Why do you need it ? Is there something already in your life that already satisfies the need ? If yes, would it be better to remove the other one before downloading the new one ?

Asking yourself this critical question for every “new distraction“ helps you give context and reflect on your action before it builds into your daily life and breaks your focus.

Tip 2: Create an environment of friction

While you would have defined a purpose and limited yourself to “known distractions”, it is still inevitable that you would face new and old distractions in different forms everyday. This is why creating an environment of friction to stop developing bad distractions will keep them to a minimum.

Example: If you seem to be particularly spending a lot of time on one social media application, it might make sense to delete the application but instead limit the usage of it via the website. This way you can still access the application and you have created an environment of friction for the distractions of the application - like mobile notifications that will pull your focus away.

You can similarly do this for any other activity, this way, the distractions won’t reach you easily. You just have to identify and then build that environment of friction for every such distraction.

Tip 3: Set a time and stick to it

Social media today is nearly addictive business, while it is certainly a large distraction entity, there are potential uses when used with appropriate limits. You could do this by defining a time, duration and situation for your social media usage.

Example: “I would use this particular application for a maximum of 30 min a day when I am commuting back from work and have nothing else to do”

This will help you allow the “distractions” to be in your life without effecting your other important activities and you won’t be carrying the guilt of “missing out” on things.

Tip 4: Don’t be a dumb scroll

Most social media applications are based on a “Never ending Scroll” principle. You would never reach the end of content. There is so much content out there which is getting generated and served to you that you would spend a huge chunk of your time but still not be satisfied enough to close the application, this is true for any kind of content - videos, short videos, posts, images etc…

This is why - set a principle to yourself, that you won’t be a “dumb scroll”, who would just keep scrolling. Instead you would stop using the application when you don’t find the content you are looking for.

This can be done by customising your application to only show you content that you want to see/read/watch.

Example: If you see something that is not useful, just cross it out of your view, this will tell the algorithms that you are not interested in it and you won’t (probably)see it again. When you do this attentively always, over time, you end up seeing only the content which is useful for you.

This way you have made the distractions effectively work for you and not work against you.

Tip 5: Reward and Punishment

We all know the story of carrot and horse - the more the horse gets the carrot, the more is the incentive for it to run.

You could follow a similar - reward and punishment mechanism. You can reward yourself something of your choice - a nice dinner, a good book, a nice watch, when you spend less time on distractions in a week/month/year. This will incentivise you to reduce time on distractions and spend more time on things that will help you grow.

Similarly, you can punish yourself by taking away something of your choice when you spend more time on distractions.

Hope you had insightful time reading the post, if you would like me to write about any other topic, don’t hesitate to hit reply to this email and send me the name of the topic.

If you would like to give me any other feedback about the content, don’t hesitate to reply either.

Interesting “thing“ of the week

On the topic of focus, I found highly recommend the book - “Deep Work“ by Cal Newport. I have drawn some inspiration from the book.

Here is one such important takeaway from the book

Warm Regards,
Mohammed Sameer

www.transmin.co.in

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