Focus, Focus, and Focus!

Welcome to this week's edition. Hopefully, you can focus for the five minutes it will take to read it, and if you cannot, well then you REALLY need to read this one!

As ever, there's a tip, an insight, and our favourite new thing, so let's get going!

The Tip: Setting Yourself Up to Concentrate

Video Length: 113 Seconds

Many of us find it very difficult to concentrate these days, and, with all the distractions around us, it's hardly surprising. Today's tip gives you a sub-5-minute routine you can use to give you a greater chance of reaching that "Flow" state. Check it out below:

The Insight: Honing Your Ability to Focus

Talking of concentrating, it's worth noting that focus is something that can be honed. Here is a summary of techniques that BillionMinders share work for them. (We have mentioned some of these before, but they are all worth repeating).

• Practice focusing by focusing. This is really simple and we've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. The more you try to focus, the better you will get at it. We recommend starting with one 15-minute focus period a day, then gradually working your way up to longer periods and more of them in a day.
• Create a "focus spot". This may be a place in your office or at home that you dedicate for focus, and you do NOT use when you are aimlessly scrolling (for example). One BillionMinder has a specific corner of his deck that he uses to write and think - he never visits that spot any other time!
• Think like an engineer - When engineers try to troubleshoot systems, they typically change one component and measure the results before moving on. As you optimize your environment to support good focus, you can do the same. If you have trouble concentrating, rather than giving up, think about the one most likely thing that affected it, and next time address JUST that one thing. Repeat that practice every time you focus until you have things down.
• Practice Meditation. The acts of meditating and concentrating are actually surprisingly similar. In most forms of meditation, you are focusing on a single thing (such as being present in your breath) and are learning to redirect thoughts as they emerge. As well as calming you in the moment, BillionMinders often report that it helps build better work concentration skills.
• Use the right tool for the job: Your computer is an amazing multipurpose device that you can use for most of the varied work you have day to day, but it's not always the BEST tool for the job, particularly if that job involves some form of deep thought. A great example is focused writing. We write these newsletters away from a computer on a dedicated device (see below). We actually only use the computer for supporting research and publishing them. Believe it or not, it's far faster, as the writing happens with no distractions.

Our Favourite New Thing

We mentioned we write this newsletter on a dedicated device. Many of you will have used dedicated e-readers for years, but e-writers (such as the Remarkable Tablet, the Kindle Scribe and the Kobo Elipsa) can be really useful for focused writing, annotating, and note-taking. We've looked at them all, but particularly love the feel of the Remarkable. Plus Remarkable now offers a physical keyboard add-on that fits neatly in the device's cover. You can argue that it's basically a connected typewriter, but to be honest, it's missing the point.

In short, here's what we love about it. 1) The writing experience is almost indistinguishable from paper, so much so that you naturally reach for it instead of paper 2) You can annotate text as quickly as you can in a physical book 3) You can rapidly sync back to your other devices.

That's, ultimately, why we write this newsletter on it.

About Us

BillionMinds brings you?this newsletter?each and every week. But that’s not all we do. We also help employees and managers in companies around the world embed key soft skills to thrive in the modern workplace and get certified in those skills. Each of our Learn/Do experiences is less than 10 minutes a day and you can see meaningful change within two weeks.

We work with both companies and individual employees. Certification programs start at $200 and we provide discounts for those seeking work. For more information, visit us?here.