Focusing On One Thing

Focus on one thing in order to make progress.  Think of it this way, you have five soccer balls.  You can kick one ball five times or kick each ball once.  The ball that is kicked five times is going to go farther than kicking each ball once.  This is the idea of focusing on one thing so it gets to completion faster.

Focusing on one thing will help you achieve that goal faster.  Putting your energy toward multiple tasks will deplete your brain power much more quickly than if you were to stay focused on one thing.  Instead of splitting your time between multiple tasks, focus on one thing at a time.

It’s been thought that multitasking is a skill.  You may even have it on your resume.  But studies have shown that when you multitask, it takes you brain longer to get back into the flow of things.  Toggling back and forth only confuses your brain rather than letting it focus on just one thing.

Think about a time when you were deep in thought and someone came up distracting you with a question. Your brain switches your thinking to come up with a response.  The concentration you had on your task is now broken.  It can take your brain a while to get back on track to what you were originally working on.  At this point, you often say to yourself, now what was I doing?  Your brain feels lost and is struggling to remember where you left off.

You may have also experienced walking into a room and forgetting what you were going in there for.  Your brain was swimming with other thoughts and it got off track from what you were trying to do in the first place.  Choose to focus on one thing at a time.

Another example is often times you have multiple internet tabs open on your computer.  You toggle back and forth while you’re waiting for one page to load.  This too can cause your brain to lose focus.  Put forth the energy to focus on doing one thing at a time.

When you have so many projects going on your brain is stressed.  It is overloaded with ideas that all sound great but it doesn’t know what to focus on.  When this happens, it becomes easier to procrastinate and not do anything because your brain is overwhelmed.  Doing nothing becomes the easier choice because fewer decisions are needed to be made and it requires less brain power.  This is why near the end of the day you may feel exhausted because your brain is tired of making decisions. 

Reduce the number of decisions your brain needs to make each day by creating your schedule the night before. That way, you wake up with an action plan and your brain power is spent focusing on the one thing that needs to get done.

An added bonus is to make better use of your time by knowing when your mind is the most focused.  For you that may be in the morning, or perhaps you wake up groggy and need a few hours before you’re fully awake.  Realize when your mind is the most focused and work on one thing during that time.  Remember to reduce the amount of time spent switching between tasks in order to conserve brain power.

The key is to stop focusing on ten million projects that you want to accomplish.  Choose one and see it through.  If you were to build a bridge across the water, you wouldn’t try building five bridges at once.  Each one would be at different phases and you’d be so far from completion.  This is true with any task.  Stop jumping from task to task without completing anything.  Put all your efforts into focusing on one thing and complete it.