As an entrepreneur, you have a lot on your plate. Staying focused can be tough with a constant stream of employees, clients , emails, and phone calls demanding your attention. Amid the noise, understanding your brain’s limitations and working around them can improve your focus and increase your productivity .
Our brains are finely attuned to distraction, so today's digital environment makes it especially hard to focus. "Distractions signal that something has changed," says David Rock, co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work
(HarperCollins, 2009). "A distraction is an alert says, 'Orient your attention here now; this could be dangerous.'" The brain's reaction is automatic and virtually unstoppable.
While multitasking is an important skill, it also has a downside. "It reduces our intelligence, literally dropping our IQ," Rock says. "We make mistakes, miss subtle cues, fly off the handle when we shouldn't, or spell things wrong."
To make matters worse, distraction feels great. "Your brain's reward circuit lights up when you multitask,” Rock says, meaning that you get an emotional high when you're doing a lot at once.
Ultimately, the goal is not constant focus, but a short period of distraction-free time every day. "Twenty minutes a day of deep focus could be transformative," Rock says.
Try these three tips to help you become more focused and productive:
1. Do creative work first.
2. Allocate your time deliberately.
3. Train your mind like a muscle.
Typically, we do mindless work first and build up to the toughest tasks. That drains your energy and lowers your focus. "An hour into doing your work, you've got a lot less capacity than (at the beginning)," Rock says. "Every decision we make tires the brain."
In order to focus effectively, reverse the order. Check off the tasks that require creativity or concentration first thing in the morning, and then move on to easier work, like deleting emails or scheduling meetings, later in the day.
By studying thousands of people, Rock found that we are truly focused for an average of only six hours per week. "You want to be really diligent with what you put into those hours," he says.
Most people focus best in the morning or late at night, and Rock's studies show that 90 percent of people do their best thinking outside the office. Notice where and when you focus best, then allocate your toughest tasks for those moments.
When multitasking is the norm, your brain quickly adapts. You lose the ability to focus as distraction becomes a habit. "We've trained our brains to be unfocused," Rock says.
Practice concentration by turning off all distractions and committing your attention to a single task. Start small, maybe five minutes per day, and work up to larger chunks of time. If you find your mind wandering, just return to the task at hand. "It’s just like getting fit," Rock says. "You have to build the muscle to be focused."
Back to the topic of the day....selling your brain to make profit that letting it wax away, After spending a decade believing I was selling my brain, I recently discovered that I have not been
doing that at all – I have been selling labor hours. It is very easy to start selling labor hours
without being aware of it but there are ways to prevent it. Doing so requires unbiased
introspection which may be difficult, but going through the following points can be very helpful:
Do you spend more time working on your computer than speaking with people? I did that,
for I believed that it would be easier to close a deal with images, PowerPoints, Excels, Words
and PDFs rather than just drafting a quick outline. I spent around 80% of the workday generating
content instead of actually working with the client solving a problem. Once I reduced that to
20% – and that required quite an effort – business began to accelerate. While engaged with a
project, I found myself forced to cut time to market for a client from six months to two and that
meant that fat had to be trimmed. I nearly stopped drafting anything – basically mapped it out in
my head using mental PowerPoints, Excels, Words – reduced meeting and meeting duration from
30 minutes to 15 and got the ball rolling at high-speed. Once everything was in place, partners,
distributors, end-customers and investors, I pieced together a brief Word document (converted
to PDF), a short spreadsheet and a 7-page PowerPoint, That is all it took to seal the deal. What I
learned from this is that if you focus on selling your brain alone, you catch the momentum
whereas going the document way may cause you to lose it.
Do you micromanage more than delegate? My issue here was that I did not trust anyone to
deliver the message I wanted as I wanted – text, image, layout and format. Since I could not
really delegate – although I believed I was actually doing just that – I wasted valuable time on
what font should be used for headers instead of working with the client solving problems or laying
growth strategies. As I am quite proficient at text, visual and numerical delivery, I preferred to
handle that myself whether or not I had others do it. What happened was that I would
superimpose how I would have done it over the material being submitted. That is not how to run
an efficient operation. Micromanagement eats up time, creates discomfort for the ones working
for you, and may cause a myriad of problems that slow down revenue generation. If you want to
earn more faster, reduce – or stop – micromanaging.
Do you surround yourself with people better at certain things than you are? If you
micromanage, you will correct what other people do. People that micromanage are usually
perfectionists (I am) and accepting imperfection (according to own aesthetic threshold) is just as
unpleasant as eating fermented shark (an Icelandic dish; “ The single worst, most disgusting and
terrible tasting thing I have ever eaten .” Chef Anthony Bourdain, Travel Channel ). Anyone
subjected to micromanagement will quickly begin to divert attention from the task at hand to a
growing resentment toward you . That reduces efficiency and usually results in sloppy work. After
all, if you know your boss will change everything you do, why bother?! When I stopped
micromanaging, something spectacular happened: I transformed from laborer to leader. Now
I expect things to be done properly, although I do not expect them to be done exactly as I would
do them. The way to get to this point is to prioritize tasks and be willing to let go once they
have been delegated to the proper personnel. Once I fully understood the value of doing this and
was able to put a price tag on it (hint: compensation), company growth accelerated.
Do you prioritize or do you work on everything at the same time? In my book, multi-tasking
means getting less done in more time. We cannot think two thoughts at the same time although
the brain can switch so rapidly that we are deceived into believing that we can. We can’t, for
instance, think of an oil tanker and a tomato at the same time without putting both in same
mental image. We can switch rapidly between the two, but we can’t ‘see ‘ both unless we put
them adjacent to one another (and even then we can’t ‘ see ‘ both as our mind’s eye switches
between them). Given the difficulty of this simple task, imagine the effect is has when working
on multiple projects at the same time? In my case, I have to ‘ rewire‘ my brain before changing
between projects which is why I prefer to work on few projects at a time and preferably of very
different nature. The greater the overlaps between projects, the higher the risk that mistakes
will occur as we confuse the two.
Have you put yourself to the challenge of generating revenue using ONLY your brain? Last
year, I asked myself that question and ended up staring into thin air. I had no real concept of
what that meant. The method I used to test this theory was to operate only on email and
telephone; no PowerPoints, Excels, or Words, only my mind and my mouth. The result was mind-
boggling. Before I did this, my reach was limited to Icelandic businesses and a handful of US firms
(I spent seven years there, so I had some contacts still intact). Today, I have a network
capable of penetrating the largest companies on the planet exactly where I want it to penetrate
. The epiphany came when I understood that people are not persuaded by documents but by
other people . If you respect them and what they do, they will respect you and what you do.
Once you have engaged in friendly talks and have formulated a project that creates a mutual
gain, then you whip together the necessary documents and seal the deal. I have found that this
leads to closer, longer lasting relationships than actually trying to sell someone something based
on promotional materials or business plans. People like being sold something that they can gain
from, and sometimes that gain is just interacting with another professional on the same level
(that can lead to very interesting projects). I have been very fortunate to have met a lot of
great people out there that hold impressive positions yet are very passionate about other things
such as the preservation of the Amazon. Companies are not blocks of cement, they are
people . When building a business, it is very easy to forget that which sets the stage for labor
hour sales.
These are just my observations; there is no right or wrong when it comes to building a business.
Or is there?
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