University of California published an interesting study about interruption, particularly about how to focus at work.
While observing how people manage at work, one of the things that they found out was that, on average, workers and white-collar workers get interrupted every three minutes.
Every three minutes, there’s something that will come and break your concentration.
Unbelievable!
Bonjour. In this video, I want to share one simple advice to increase your focus.
In offices, we’ve moved from having a closed office to open plan to activity-based.
Now, a lot of people are also working from home. And many of us have kids at home and have other temptations or things coming around, like our mobile phones ringing.
These constantly break our concentration.
Now, you might ask me, “What’s the problem?”
Some of you might have read this great book called Deep Work from Cal Newport.
In the book, Cal Newport said that the best-performing students were not the ones working longer hours but those who had the ability to create deep focus.
And then, he found the same thing in the business world.
So, this ability to create deep focus is so important for our performance. But with our environment, we break that all the time.
It’s a big topic.
In fact, when I work with leadership teams, we have a whole discussion about focus, the danger of interruption and distractions, and different things you can do about that.
That’s a whole topic in itself.
But there’s a simple advice I’d like to give you:
Put the right background music.
Surprised?
It might work for some of you, it might not work for others. But for me, it works really well.
Now, you might say, “No, actually, music is going to decrease my focus.”
But what I found is that if you found the right music to listen to, it puts you in the zone and can increase your focus.
There are a few playlists on Spotify that I enjoy, such as:
● Concentration Perfector
● Deep Focus
● Baroque Music for Focus Work
● Intense Study
Those are just a few examples. And I’m sure if you Google it, you’ll find many playlists that can work for you.
If you are in a work environment and you need to have deep focus, putting on noise cancellation ear plugs to listen the right music makes a hell of a difference.
So, let me ask you these questions:
What are your tactics to increase your focus?
What do you do when you really want to focus?
It’s really important to be aware of that.
This is this week’s Work Smarter, Live Better tip. I hope you enjoyed it. Back to my focus. You have a lovely day.
A bientôt,
Cyril
