Do you start the day fully focused but end up achieving nothing?

Imagine being a world leader right now. There you are, ready to start your day to focus on delivering growth, for example. Or you might be prepared to defend your country again from a Russian tyrant. You may even be getting yourself ready to face an impending election. Meanwhile, another world leader has different plans.

First, he says he’ll set a tariff against you. Then, on the same day, he announces that he is making a peace deal with another country without your consent. Moments later, he says he will buy part of another nation to create a Riviera. Before the day ends, he talks about paper straws and issues an executive order banning men from participating in women’s sports.?

As another world leader, you would find it hard to keep up. One moment, you start to do what you want for the day, and almost immediately, you are distracted into doing something else because of those unexpected presidential orders from afar. No sooner have you started to consider your response and you are distracted by something else forced upon you by the very same president.? Of course, this is a deliberate strategy by that president. The more you overload other people, the less they can focus and the less they achieve, ensuring you remain in complete charge. It is a leadership style that only ever leads to disaster.

However, world leaders are not alone in being blown off course. The other day, on my way home from the office, I remarked to a colleague that I felt as though I hadn’t achieved anything even though I had worked hard all day. He agreed, saying several days each week, he sets out to do something, only to be diverted by events and needless distractions. I suspect you, too, may be familiar with this kind of situation.?

Staying focused on what we want or need to do is increasingly difficult. You are working on a project when suddenly someone calls you on Microsoft Teams. You take the call, only for a chat message to appear on the bottom right of your screen and an email to ping at the same time. The dramatic change in how we work in recent years has been significant in helping us achieve less by doing more—the law of distraction.

Much of this problem has to do with leadership. Leaders are not setting parameters for the way we use the technology. Also, they are not setting the right example themselves, sending emails at 9pm on a Friday, for instance, or calling sudden “emergency” Zoom meetings that are clearly only happening because they have forgotten to do something and are seeking your help to rescue the situation. Leaders might think that allowing staff to use everything modern technology offers is a good thing. However, as researchers at Stanford pointed out almost a decade ago, modern multitasking has real effects on our working and long-term memories. Not only are we less efficient, but the current technologically driven way of work is reducing our future performance due to the impact on our memory.

Thankfully, the Harvard Business Review recently published a guide on how to deal with these modern problems of distraction that prevent us from being focused. A blog post on the Zapier website also proposed that we should deal with seven habits that cause us difficulty achieving our daily goals. However, neuroscientists in New York have discovered another way you may be able to stay focused and achieve more. They have found that the new trend for “workflow music” actually does help. It turns out that “Deep Focus - Work Flow” playlists are the only kind of music tested that helped people improve their performance. It could be worth a go.

Failing that, you could take drastic action and do what this tech writer did with an old laptop. He stripped it back to basics, allowing him to produce a “distraction-free machine”. Can somebody buy one for President Trump?