BE FOCUSED!!! FOCUS IS FANTASTIC!!!!

Focused person tune it out and focus tightly on the person or task in front of them. These are the people whom you admire because they make you feel worthy of their attention. The work product they create has depth and thought.

How do you keep focus?

1. Minimize multitasking. Reuters. ...
2. Meditate. AMC. ...
3. Exercise regularly.
4. Establish a to-do list.
5. Try a small amount of caffeine.
6. Take breaks.
7. Keep work at work.
8. Train your brain to focus. Business Insider.
9. Try to find a quiet place.
10. Stare at a distant object for a few minutes.
11. Get a good night's sleep.
12. Work offline.
13. Designate your perfect study spot.
14. Embrace boredom.
15. Devote Specific hours to Task.

That was I doing again?We've all had days where we can't seem to focus, asking that question too many times to count. For some of us, those days are more common than we'd like.

Whether it's fatigue, distractions, lack of motivation, or something else entirely, our inability to focus digs a hole in our productivity and, therefore, can jeopardize our chances of success.But you don't have to go to extremes, like the main character in the Wolf of Wall Street does, to get focused. There are better ways. Here are 15 tips that scientists have found enhance focus.

Minimize multitasking.

Multi-taskers might seem super-human, but they pay a big price, according to a 2009 Stanford study. In a sample of 100 Stanford students, abut half identified themselves as media multitaskers. The other half did not.

The test examined attention spans, memory capacity, and ability to switch from one task to the next — and the multitaskers performed more poorly or each test.

"They're suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them," Clifford Nass, who was a researcher for the study, said in a Stanford press release.

Meditate.

If the saying "practice makes perfect" is true, then meditation is a sure way to enhance focus because it takes a great deal of concentration. Scientific experiments agree:

One study at the University of North Carolina, for example revealed that students who meditated for just 20 minutes a day for 4 days performed better on certain cognitive tests.

Exercise regularly.

Exercise isn't just good for the body. It promotes brain health, too, which is important for memory capacity and concentration, according to John Ratey, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

In particular, scientists think regular exercise may help stimulate the release of a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor(BDNF), which some research suggests helps rewire memory circuits to improve their functioning.

Establish a to-do list.

To-do lists not only help you prioritize what tasks you need to get done first, they can serve as a record of the loose ends.

Cal Newport, a computer science professor and author of the book "Deep Work," which comes out in January, told Business Insider that having a recording of all the things you still need to do can help you stay focused on the upcoming task. If not, he said, that incomplete work could eat away at your concentration. This stems from something called the Zeigarnik Effect, which is the tendency to remember incomplete tasks instead of completed ones.

Try a small amount of caffeine.

If you're feeling groggy, grab a cup of joe or other caffeinated substance. Studies suggest that caffeine may, in moderate doses, help to boost focus — particularly in those of us who are fatigued.

But don't get over zealous with the coffee, or you might get the caffeine jitters, which typically reduce your ability to concentrate.

Take breaks.

You might have heard that watching cat videos on YouTube can improve productivity. Well, that's true — sort of.

Whether it's watching cat videos, taking a walk, or closing your eyes for a few minutes at a time, it is critical to take the occasional break from work. In one study, 84 subjects were asked to perform a simple computer task for one hour.

Those who were allowed two brief breaks during that hour performed consistently for the entire time whereas those who weren't offered a break performed worse over time.

Keep work at work.

Newport recommends completely separating yourself after leaving the office and having a "long separation" before the next work day.

Apart from just giving your brain a break, some research suggests that having downtime away from a problem could help you solve it. According to the unconscious thought theory, stepping away from a difficult situation can help you come to a better conclusion than trying to resolve it in one sitting.

However, this theory is a bit disputed: A 2015 meta-analysis of unconscious thought advantage studies came to the conclusion that a diversion from a decision doesn't necessarily lead to a better choice than a decision made in a deliberation period.

Train your brain to focus.

Your brain is a mental muscle, and some studies have found that people who are easily distracted will benefit from "brain training" exercises, like those promoted by Lumosity or Cogmed.

However, which exercises work — and for how well or long their effects last — is unclear. Therefore, the purported benefits of brain training need further examination, Susanne Jaeggi — who studies the brain and memory at the University of California — told New Scientist.

Try to find a quiet place.

Ambient noise, like cars honking or kids screaming, can stimulate the release of stress hormone cortisol, Mark A. W. Andrews, the former Director of the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine at Seton Hill University in PA, told Scientific American.

Too much cortisol can impair function and hinder focus. And, unfortunately, the more we're exposed to ambient noise, the worse our body responds, according to Andrews.

Stare at a distant object for a few minutes.

Many of us spend most of our waking hours staring at a digital screen, which can strain our eyes and actually make it more difficult to focus on, and therefore process, what we're looking at.

To refocus the eyes, just stare at a distant object for a few minutes. One doctor suggested the "20-20-20 rule" to a journalist at LifeHacker. It goes like this: Every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to stare at an object at least 20 feet away.

Get a good night's sleep.

One of the main symptoms of chronic sleep loss is poor concentration. Getting a solid 7 to 8 hours ahead of a busy work day could be the difference between being frazzled and being laser focused.

Work offline.

If you can disconnect from the Internet, there are fewer things to distract you from the work at hand. Experts think that every time you flip between tasks — whether it be responding to a friend on Facebook or checking your inbox — a little bit of your attention remains with the task you just left.

Sophie Leroy, a professor at the University of Washington Bothell coined the term "attention residue" as the reason for why it's so hard to change tasks. Eliminating those online distractions can keep you from finding tasks to flip between and help you focus.

Designate your perfect study spot.

Focusing requires a lot of willpower, and so does making decisions. According to a concept called ego depletion, we have a finite amount of mental energy, and both decision-making and willpower can drain it.

To save that energy for concentration, proponents of the theory suggest getting rid of excess variables that require you to make decisions, like choosing where to work. Try working from the same location whenever you need to focus, for example. That way, when it's time to get the work done, you won't have to waste time deciding where to go.

Embrace boredom.

If you're used to needing multiple forms of stimulation while "relaxing," it may have a negative impact on your ability to focus, says Newport. So instead of checking Facebook from your phone while watching Netflix, he suggests picking one of the two activities or taking an all-out break from stimulation.

In small doses, Newport says boredom can be helpful, especially if it keeps you from multitasking overload.

Devote specific hours to tasks.

We've all been there. You show up to the coffee shop, the whole day's ahead of you, but you just can't focus for an hour or two.

Newport says giving yourself tighter parameters could help cut down the amount of decisions you have to make. Like picking a consistent focus spot, designating "focus hours" also helps fend off ego depletion.

8 Things Really Focused People Do

How they defy distractions and get more done.

There is no shortage of distraction in life. If you're trying to focus on work, your family needs your attention. Try to focus on family, and the duties of the job get in the way. People load up with hobbies and trips and learning and aspirations and TV and Internet surfing and video games and social media. And then there are all those distractions caused by elements outside of your control, like news and politics and bureaucracy. It's really quite amazing that anyone ever gets anything done at all.

But some people know how to work through all that distraction. They tune it out and focus tightly on the person or task in front of them. These are the people whom you admire because they make you feel worthy of their attention. The work product they create has depth and thought. Well, you don't have to just admire these people. You can learn from them as well. Here are eight things they do to focus.

1. Clear the noise

You live in an overstimulated, noisy world. It can easily take control of you. People who focus start by controlling their environment. Set up space that is conducive to the task at hand. Not just your physical environment but mental as well. If you are focusing on a work project, get rid of the beeps and dings of notifications. If trying to focus on people, turn off your smartphone. Remove everything that is not helpful to your objective.

2. Create a plan.

If you don't know what to do first, you'll waste time and energy. Really focused people always have some sort of plan to follow. They have a clear picture of where they're going and a reasonable idea of how to get there. Set up a structured path for your objective. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be just a few bullet points in an email. That way when you veer off course, you can quickly reset and get back on track.

3. Set up clear compensation.

A big part of being unfocused stems from being unmotivated. Really focused people clearly understand why they are engaging in any form of activity. Determine early on what's in it for you so that you are excited about the task at hand. Create a reward for completion to help yourself become accountable and make the task a priority over all other distractions.

4. Create routine.

Being disorganized can cause distraction, stress, and inefficiency. Really focused people don't allow mess and chaos to get in the way of their objectives. If you are not good at organization, enlist someone who is. Give everything its proper place and home. Control the things you can control so you can be free to deal with the things you can't.

5. Work methodically.

With so many projects and tasks to accomplish, it can be tempting to try to multitask and get everything done at once. Really focused people know that multitasking is a sure way to accomplish less work. And the work you do accomplish is lower quality--and takes more time. Schedule your day to compartmentalize projects so you can give them your complete attention. That way, your thinking can be robust and thorough.

6. Live in the now.

History has value for learning, and the future is worthy for guidance, but all progress happens in the immediate. Focused people are present in the moment. It's important to pay respect to lessons from before, and the vision of where you are going, but you need to be hyper-aware of what is happening around you right now, or you may miss your preferred destiny and end up with a regretful past.

7. No Second Guessing.

One of the most distracting activities in life is comparing yourself with others. It's very tempting to use others' achievements and progress as a measuring stick for your own, but the reality for everyone is different. Really focused people know that too much worrying about the performance of contemporaries drains much-needed energy and inhibits effort. In fact, get lost in the affairs of others and you might forget to focus on yourself at all.

8. Embrace failure.

It's tempting to assume that setting attainable goals means that you will most certainly accomplish everything on your agenda. Disappointment in missing the mark eats up energy that can be used to get things done. Really focused people quickly assess their failures to learn from their bad assumptions and actions. Then they make the adjustment and get right back to achieving and accomplishing on the path to success.

How can I keep my mind focused?

Exercises That Will Strengthen Your Attention

1. Increase the strength of your focus gradually. ...
2. Create a distraction to-do list. ...
3. Build your willpower. ...
4. Meditate. ...
5. Practice mindfulness throughout the day. ...
6. Exercise (your body). ...
7. Memorize stuff. ...
8. Read long stuff slowly.

What does it mean to stay focused?

Stay focused on your goals! ... If you want to be successful you must focus on goals, in business or personal affairs. To focus means to direct time and attention to a limited number of issues. Things that are outside your selected area of focus become unimportant.

Stay focused on your goals!

How to stay focused on your goals! Say No!

If you want to be successful you must focus on goals, in business or personal affairs.

To focus means to direct time and attention to a limited number of issues. Things that are outside your selected area of focus become unimportant. Tune them out rigorously. – But this is easier said than done.

Do you also have a tough time rigorously rejecting requests, calls for help or opportunities that present themselves when these are outside of your area of focus?

I occasionally catch myself saying “yes” when I should have actually said “no”. Someone asks me for a favor, and I agree without giving it much thought. This usually results in stress and unnecessary time pressure.

Why do we have such a tough time saying “NO”?

I can think of several answers to this:

• We underestimate the effort.
• We fear consequences.
• We are afraid that we will miss out on something.
• We suffer from the helper syndrome.
• We feel flattered.
• We want to be liked.
• We feel responsible, even though we are actually not.

Which response best applies to you?

This is how to handle opportunities and requests!

The following tips help me to handle opportunities, request and favors that are outside my area of focus. They may not always work for me – but I am getting better results all the time:

1. Do not rush the decision!

Take the time to think about it, so that you can realistically assess the effort. Create a clear picture of the consequences for yourself if you agree. What does this mean in terms of time and stress?

2. When you say no, do so courteously but directly!

Do not beat around the bush. Your rationales should be brief and to the point.

3. Whenever possible, offer an alternative!

In this way you help the other party and stay focused.

4. Once you have made a decision, stick with it.

Remain rigorous!

Fear of change!

The fear of missing out on an opportunity is frequently stronger than the awareness to remain focused. I frequently observe this in companies that need to adjust or change their previous business model.

They develop a good corporate strategy to improve their profitability. Everyone is in agreement that long-term profitability can only be attained by rigorous positioning. The new strategy is adopted and is ready for implementation – no sooner than that, a telephone call comes in and all the old habits fall back in place:

“Yes, I know! We want to focus on the profitable industry A, but here is this new customer from industry B who is dangling this order in front of us…..”

And just like that, the good intention to focus comes crashing down. Instead of saying “no”, the decision is made to take the path of least resistance.

The laboriously developed strategy is placed on the back burner. The new positioning to become more profitable falls by the wayside. It is best to generate revenue now at a low contribution margin. After all, it is possible that the new strategy might not work out.

Albert Einstein appropriately described this behavior as follows:

“The purest form of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and to also expect that something will change.”

This is how to remain rigorous and focused!

Before adopting a strategy discuss its implementation in detail. Simulate various scenarios. Think about what could go wrong during the implementation process. Discuss what-if scenarios and how your company needs to respond to these.

Set a minimum period during which you and your company will remain true to the new strategy, for instance 3 months. Do not allow yourself to lose focus during these 3 months, regardless of what “opportunities” present themselves during this period. Change your focus during this time only if you are confronted with an unexpected critical issue.

You should then evaluate the results after 3 months and reassess the situation. Is it necessary to adjust the strategy and your focus? Now is the time to do so – but not before this period has expired.

How can I focus better?

Our attention spans are dwindling, but focus is a muscle that you can build if you work on it. Pay attention: How can I focus better?

Here are eight tricks and tips for eliminating distractions and paying attention to what you need to do:

1. Prepare Your Brain. Before a task, calm your brain, says Venezky. ...
2. Understand Where Your Focus Needs To Be. ...
3. Unplug For 30 Minutes. ...
4. Grab Some Coffee. ...
5. Check the Thermostat. ...
6. Turn On Some Music. ...
7. Take Short Breaks. ...
8. Doodle.

The average human has an eight-second attention span–less than that of a goldfish, according to a 2015 study from Microsoft. That number has shrunk over the years due to our digital connectedness and the fact that the brain is always seeking out what’s new and what’s next.

“No matter what environment humans are in, survival depends on being able to focus on what’s important–generally what’s moving. That skill hasn’t changed, it’s just moved online,” writes Alyson Gausby, consumer insights lead for Microsoft Canada.

So what do you do when you need to focus on work–and not what’s moving around you? For most people, the first and most important step to increasing focus is to change the way you view it, says Elie Venezky, author of Hack Your Brain.

“Focus is a muscle, and you can build it,” he says. “Too many people labor under the idea that they’re just not focused, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Once you drop this mistaken belief, you can take a much more realistic approach to building focus.”

With a combination of mindset and tools, it’s possible to set up an environment that fosters focus. Here are eight tricks and tips for eliminating distractions and paying attention to what you need to do:

1. Prepare Your Brain

Before a task, calm your brain, says Venezky. “Take a minute or two to sit in a comfortable position and breathe deeply into your stomach,” he says. “You don’t have to sit cross-legged or chant. Let your body calm down before you approach your work. You’ll find it really helps you concentrate.”

2. Understand Where Your Focus Needs To Be

Focus also involves an understanding of what is worthy of your distraction, says Ron Webb, an executive director at the American Productivity and Quality Center, a nonprofit research organization. “Success comes down to embedding that focus into the flow of how you work,” he says.

Webb suggests taking time to identify what deserves your focus for the year, for the month, for the week, and for the day. Then look at your calendar and block time dedicated to focus.

Focus also involves an understanding of what is worthy of your distraction.

“This keeps folks from being able to send calendar invites that are last-minute, nonemergency issues,” he says. “These are focus killers.”

3. Unplug For 30 Minutes

If you need to focus, log out of email and social media. “Even if you live and die by email, do yourself a favor and log out for 30 minutes either in the beginning of the day or for a period in the afternoon,” says Jan Bruce, coauthor of meQuilibrium: 14 Days to Cooler, Calmer, and Happier. “You won’t believe how much you can get done when you’re not always interrupting yourself to return emails.”

4. Grab Some Coffee

That morning coffee doesn’t just help you wake up; it helps you focus on the day. If you need an attention booster in the afternoon, a coffeeshop run might do the trick. In a study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, French physiologist Astrid Nehlig identifies a connection between caffeine and cognition. While caffeine doesn’t improve learning or memory performance, Nehlig found it does increase physiological arousal, which makes you less apt to be distracted and better able to pay attention during a demanding task.

5. Check the Thermostat

If it’s too hot or too cool in your work environment, it could impact your focus. A study from Cornell University found that workers are most productive and make fewer errors in an environment that is somewhere between 68 and 77 degrees. Another study from the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland says the magic temperature is 71 degrees. If you don’t control the thermostat, you can opt to bring a sweater or a fan.

6. Turn On Some Music

Too much background noise can be very distracting, but according to a study from the Wake Forest School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina published in Scientific Reports, having music playing helps you focus on your own thoughts. The catch? You had to like the song.

“Given that musical preferences are uniquely individualized phenomena and that music can vary in acoustic complexity and the presence or absence of lyrics, the consistency of our results was unexpected,” the researchers wrote.

Whether it’s Beethoven, the Beatles, or the Beastie Boys, turn it up and get to work.

7. Take Short Breaks

Instead of succumbing to distraction, build it in, suggests a study from the University of Illinois. Psychologist Alejandro Lleras found that participants who were given short breaks during a 50-minute task performed better than those who worked straight through.

The study examines a phenomenon called “vigilance decrement,” or losing focus over time. Taking a short break in the middle of a long task reenergizes the brain.

“We propose that deactivating and reactivating your goals allows you to stay focused,” writes Lleras. “Our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks, it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself. Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task.”

8. Doodle

If you’re sitting in on a long meeting or conference, improve your focus–and your artistic skills–by doodling. According to a study from the University of Plymouth in England, doodling aids in cognitive performance and recollection.

“Doodling simply helps to stabilize arousal at an optimal level, keeping people awake or reducing the high levels of autonomic arousal often associated with boredom,” writes lead researcher Jackie Andrade.

How can I be more focused in life?

Steps

1. Understand what made you lose focus in the first place. ...
2. Organize your life. ...
3. Know your purpose for doing what you do. ...
4. Trust other people to do things. ...
5. Regularly make sure you know your priorities. ...
6. Pace yourself and don't be afraid of distractions. ...
7. Don't be afraid to ask others for advice.

Losing focus is often a result of being overwhelmed or underwhelmed. When you begin to feel like you aren't controlling your life or your goals anymore, your life begins to take control of you. Usually when you are not feeling focused, you focus on how others see you and what they expect you to do. By writing down daily tasks, rethinking key components of your lifestyle and reestablishing your average day, you can find focus and even maintain it.

Steps

• Understand what made you lose focus in the first place. Often people lose focus because they are working too hard or not hard enough. When you understand what led you to act a certain way and lose focus, you can react accordingly. Keep in mind why you aren't focused throughout reading this article. You know you best. If you analyze yourself, you can use the steps below according to how you think.
• Organize your life. You can't be clear on what you're doing unless you organize your thoughts. Think through what your goals are. Be very clear an deliberate in titling what is a goal to you. Think about the big picture when you organize your thoughts. Where Decide where you want to go physically, mentally, or even emotionally. But try to have a solid and tangible goal such as working or living in a particular place. Make sure that this goal is reasonable, however.
• Know your purpose for doing what you do. If you want to work in a particular place, know why. Is it for money, happiness, or even for others? You can't focus unless you know exactly why you do what you do. If you said yes to a task or goal because you were afraid of disappointing or hurting someone, rethink your goal. Doing something because you want to avoid hurting another drains your energy. In some regards, you have to do what is best for you and not others.
• Trust other people to do things. Don't put the weight all on yourself to get somewhere. Absolutely focus on what you want to do and understand why, however know that you can't do everything. There are some jobs that others will volunteer to do and it's your job to let them do it. If there are tasks on your to do list that keep you from doing what you feel you really need to do, then let others know you need a hand. If they realize you trust them and think they're capable, others will step up and help you. If they aren't doing a good job at a task, then take a short amount of time to help them out with it. Just be sure not to criticize them but rather coach. They're helping you, not the other way around.
• Regularly make sure you know your priorities. Understand what it most important to you reaching your ultimate goal. Every day set aside some time for yourself to jot down everything that's important for you to accomplish. Always stop and question why you're doing something and double check that it's an important thing for you to do. Never lose track of why you're doing a specific thing or else you will lose focus.
• Pace yourself and don't be afraid of distractions. If you overwork yourself, you will eventually get tired and lose focus. Non-productive time is absolutely okay. In fact, you may find that non-productive moments in your life are priceless. Don't be afraid to go out with friends for a night or two. Don't make it a habit, but absolutely give yourself a break occasionally. Creativity and focus demand you give yourself some breathing time. You can't let your creative juices flow if you're constantly working.
• Don't be afraid to ask others for advice. When you're taking the occasional break, tell your friend or family member what task you're finding difficult. Not only may you get some good ideas from them, but talking about it could also make the task at hand much easier for you to work around because you're in a creative atmosphere. Work is often a recited, repetitive task. Talking instills more freedom. By talking, you are giving yourself the freedom to converse your thoughts on a project and quite possibly come up with brand new and interesting ideas.
• Don't lose track of what you want. Even though you want to distract yourself occasionally, don't make a habit of it. Keep a mindset in which you focus on your goals without burning yourself out. An underlying focus you should always have is maintaining or finding happiness. Finding a balance between work and distractions is ideal. Every day make sure you remember your motives to do what you do.

How can I focus on my work?

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.

How to Stay Focused: Train Your Brain

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 h ard 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.'" T he 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.

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.

2. Allocate your time deliberately.

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.

3. Train your mind like a muscle.

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."

How do I focus on school?

Here are some tricks to help you overcome electronic distractions as you study or work.

1. Wear headphones. ...
2. Turn off anything you don't need. ...
3. Monitor your time-wasters. ...
4. Block distracting sites. ...
5. Use multiple machines or desktops. ...
6. Use multiple accounts. ...
7. Set up a reward system.

Seven smart tricks to stay focused on schoolwork and projects

Each new school year brings new challenges -- and new distractions. It's harder than ever to stay focused on work or on studying, but there are old and new tricks to help keep our mind on the game.

Whether you're a freshman noob, a gray-haired grad student, or even a long-term member of the professional elite, you most likely have trouble focusing on your tasks at times. Modern tech is lovely, but it's also a nonstop parade of distractions that can tear down the resolve of the strongest wills. Here are some tricks to help you overcome electronic distractions as you study or work.

• Wear headphones. This is especially true if you have to work around other people, but even if you're on your own, this helps you focus (as long as you have the right music playing, of course). Not only are people less likely to bug you with trivia, you should find that your sense of space narrows to a small shell around you and keeps your attention focused on whatever is right in front of you. Even white noise can help if music is in itself a distraction for you! 
• Turn off anything you don't need. Be ruthless! Unless you have a family member at the hospital or someone who needs a ride from the airport, you can turn off your phone. Same goes for e-mail, instant-messaging apps, Facebook, and anything else that might ping you. Even if you ignore it, the signals are shaking up your attention. If you can turn off your Net connection entirely (for studying or some writing tasks, for example), so much the better. 
• Monitor your time-wasters. RescueTime is a great, free service that will keep track of the sites and apps you use over time, then tell you about it in excruciating, possibly embarrassing detail. (Don't worry, your information is all kept strictly confidential.) This can be enlightening, as you might not realize how much or how little time you spent on any given distraction. Some may be harmless! 
• Block distracting sites. If you need the Net for research or communication with study buddies, you can still keep yourself from wandering over to Reddit or that one Tumblr with pictures of animals wearing socks. LeechBlock is a Firefox add-on that lets you set up sites to block and times to block them. StayFocusd is a Chrome extension that does much the same thing. You may feel weird spending time setting it up, but you are almost certain to save time in the long run. 
• Use multiple machines or desktops. Not all of us can afford multiple computers, but if you have some extra cash, buying an inexpensive computer (maybe running Ubuntu Linux for extra savings) that is dedicated to work can pay off. Load it only with the apps you need to get your work done, then take it somewhere nice and quiet for work. A cheaper, but less effective, trick is to use multiple desktops. Macs have Mission Control built in, and Windows users can use the free Dexpot app to run multiple desktops. 
• Use multiple accounts. Another great, cheap trick is to log out of your computer, then log back in as a guest. You won't have nearly as many distracting bells and whistles, and it's so easy that pretty much anyone can do it. Of course, you'll need to keep yourself from just logging back in every few minutes, but inertia is the best friend of willpower. 
• Set up a reward system. This is somewhat advanced and requires extra willpower, but is also completely tech-independent. Set up a system that lets you goof off (or plow through e-mail, or tag your music files, or whatever) for 10 minutes following an hour of uninterrupted work. Of course, you may need to vary the times somewhat to suit your needs, but try not to let your work period fall much under a half-hour or so, especially if you're working on a large, complex project. If you try it and still find yourself checking Twitter every few minutes, this one isn't for you, so scroll back up the list until you find something that works. 

Some combination of these should help you channel your inner monk and get that big project done on time. Good luck!

Benefits of Being More Focused

Being focused is undoubtedly going to make you feel more positive and controlled in your life. Knowing what's important in your life will be the seed that will determine where you want to be. The skill is in being committed to achieve your goals. By focusing on the aspects of attainment will clarify what you have to do. You have to remember that you will have to sustain your focus to become more productive and achieve your dreams, so keep working at it. In the end you will get better opportunities and you will be more satisfied with your choices and your life. The benefit you will experience will be determined by your commitment and practice. Regardless, these are a few of the benefits that you will experience.

You will feel more in control

Being more focused means being able to pay attention to your plan and control the everyday distractions that life puts in your path. Of course there will be times when unforeseen things happen but you will be more prepared and confident to deal with them. It would be foolish to suggest that no one experiences insecurities and doubts, 'feel' them and learn from them. Always be mindful of your plan and follow it. But be mindful that it might not go according to your initial plan, that doesn't mean that you won't find a way to resolve it. It's for you to have a contingency in place.

You will be more positive

Be confident in what you know and what you believe you can achieve. Positivity and being more optimistic will underpin your goals. Your psychological state will drive your determination that will enable you to achieve your aspirations. Trust yourself, tell yourself that you can do it. The small successes will drive the presenting challenges that will enable you to deal with the bigger tasks. Acknowledge your hard work. By having a plan and matched focus to achieve your goals will provide you with a foundation for your future successes.

You will develop a better understanding of yourself

Connect with your inner self. The internal growth, development and pursuit of any plan will make you stronger in the long term. Consciously reflect on your journey

. Even if things don't go according to plan, look for the lessons and consider the learning in it. Will you give up unconditionally or will you find a way through. Transference of this learning will result in a stronger belief in you capabilities.

You will be better at problem solving

Reflect on the developed understanding. Your developed awareness and commitment to succeed will provide you with the opportunity to implement the skills and knowledge when you come up against future challenges. Being more focused and developing your concentration will give you marked improvements in every area of your life.

Improved decision making

Trust in yourself and learn to trust others again. This will support future decision making. The formation and growth in your character as a person will be with you throughout your lifespan, if you maintain the principles discussed.

More clarity

Consistent reflection will act as a compass that can be used to measure your progress. You will know what your goals are and have planned for the way forward. This developed clarity will enable you to focus and not be distracted from your goals. Be open in the knowledge that the path to achieving your goals may have to alter, that is part of life. As long as the core remains solid and you believe in yourself the path to realisation will still be manageable

The Focused Leader

A primary task of leadership is to direct attention.To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition.

Grouping these modes of attention into three broad buckets—focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world—sheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Focusing inward and focusing constructively on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. A fuller understanding of how they focus on the wider world can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations.

Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.

Focusing on Yourself

Emotional intelligence begins with self-awareness—getting in touch with your inner voice. Leaders who heed their inner voices can draw on more resources to make better decisions and connect with their authentic selves. But what does that entail? A look at how people focus inward can make this abstract concept more concrete.

Self-awareness.

Hearing your inner voice is a matter of paying careful attention to internal physiological signals. These subtle cues are monitored by the insula, which is tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain. Attention given to any part of the body amps up the insula’s sensitivity to that part. Tune in to your heartbeat, and the insula activates more neurons in that circuitry. How well people can sense their heartbeats has, in fact, become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.

Gut feelings are messages from the insula and the amygdala, which the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, of the University of Southern California, calls somatic markers. Those messages are sensations that something “feels” right or wrong. Somatic markers simplify decision making by guiding our attention toward better options. They’re hardly foolproof (how often was that feeling that you left the stove on correct?), so the more comprehensively we read them, the better we use our intuition. (See “Are You Skimming This Sidebar?”)

Are You Skimming This Sidebar?

Do you have trouble remembering what someone has just told you in conversation? Did you drive to work this morning on autopilot? Do you focus more on your smartphone than on the person you’re having lunch with?

Attention is a mental muscle; like any other muscle, it can be strengthened through the right kind of exercise. The fundamental rep for building deliberate attention is simple: When your mind wanders, notice that it has wandered, bring it back to your desired point of focus, and keep it there as long as you can. That basic exercise is at the root of virtually every kind of meditation. Meditation builds concentration and calmness and facilitates recovery from the agitation of stress.

So does a video game called Tenacity, now in development by a design group and neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin. Slated for release in 2014, the game offers a leisurely journey through any of half a dozen scenes, from a barren desert to a fantasy staircase spiraling heavenward. At the beginner’s level you tap an iPad screen with one finger every time you exhale; the challenge is to tap two fingers with every fifth breath. As you move to higher levels, you’re presented with more distractions—a helicopter flies into view, a plane does a flip, a flock of birds suddenly scud by.

When players are attuned to the rhythm of their breathing, they experience the strengthening of selective attention as a feeling of calm focus, as in meditation. Stanford University is exploring that connection at its Calming Technology Lab, which is developing relaxing devices, such as a belt that detects your breathing rate. Should a chock-full in-box, for instance, trigger what has been called e-mail apnea, an iPhone app can guide you through exercises to calm your breathing and your mind.

Consider, for example, the implications of an analysis of interviews conducted by a group of British researchers with 118 professional traders and 10 senior managers at four City of London investment banks. The most successful traders (whose annual income averaged ￡500,000) were neither the ones who relied entirely on analytics nor the ones who just went with their guts. They focused on a full range of emotions, which they used to judge the value of their intuition. When they suffered losses, they acknowledged their anxiety, became more cautious, and took fewer risks. The least successful traders (whose income averaged only ￡100,000) tended to ignore their anxiety and keep going with their guts. Because they failed to heed a wider array of internal signals, they were misled.

Zeroing in on sensory impressions of ourselves in the moment is one major element of self-awareness. But another is critical to leadership: combining our experiences across time into a coherent view of our authentic selves.

To be authentic is to be the same person to others as you are to yourself. In part that entails paying attention to what others think of you, particularly people whose opinions you esteem and who will be candid in their feedback. A variety of focus that is useful here is open awareness, in which we broadly notice what’s going on around us without getting caught up in or swept away by any particular thing. In this mode we don’t judge, censor, or tune out; we simply perceive.

Leaders who are more accustomed to giving input than to receiving it may find this tricky. Someone who has trouble sustaining open awareness typically gets snagged by irritating details, such as fellow travelers in the airport security line who take forever getting their carry-ons into the scanner. Someone who can keep her attention in open mode will notice the travelers but not worry about them, and will take in more of her surroundings. (See the sidebar “Expand Your Awareness.”)

Expand Your Awareness

Just as a camera lens can be set narrowly on a single point or more widely to take in a panoramic view, you can focus tightly or expansively.

One measure of open awareness presents people with a stream of letters and numbers, such as S, K, O, E, 4, R, T, 2, H, P. In scanning the stream, many people will notice the first number, 4, but after that their attention blinks. Those firmly in open awareness mode will register the second number as well.

Strengthening the ability to maintain open awareness requires leaders to do something that verges on the unnatural: cultivate at least sometimes a willingness to not be in control, not offer up their own views, not judge others. That’s less a matter of deliberate action than of attitude adjustment.

One path to making that adjustment is through the classic power of positive thinking, because pessimism narrows our focus, whereas positive emotions widen our attention and our receptiveness to the new and unexpected. A simple way to shift into positive mode is to ask yourself, “If everything worked out perfectly in my life, what would I be doing in 10 years?” Why is that effective? Because when you’re in an upbeat mood, the University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson has found, your brain’s left prefrontal area lights up. That area harbors the circuitry that reminds us how great we’ll feel when we reach some long-sought goal.

“Talking about positive goals and dreams activates brain centers that open you up to new possibilities,” says Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve. “But if you change the conversation to what you should do to fix yourself, it closes you down….You need the negative to survive, but the positive to thrive.”

Of course, being open to input doesn’t guarantee that someone will provide it. Sadly, life affords us few chances to learn how others really see us, and even fewer for executives as they rise through the ranks. That may be why one of the most popular and overenrolled courses at Harvard Business School is Bill George’s Authentic Leadership Development, in which George has created what he calls True North groups to heighten this aspect of self-awareness.

These groups (which anyone can form) are based on the precept that self-knowledge begins with self-revelation. Accordingly, they are open and intimate, “a safe place,” George explains, “where members can discuss personal issues they do not feel they can raise elsewhere—often not even with their closest family members.” What good does that do? “We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the story of our lives to those we trust,” George says. It’s a structured way to match our view of our true selves with the views our most trusted colleagues have—an external check on our authenticity.

Self-control.

“Cognitive control” is the scientific term for putting one’s attention where one wants it and keeping it there in the face of temptation to wander. This focus is one aspect of the brain’s executive function, which is located in the prefrontal cortex. A colloquial term for it is “willpower.”

Leadership That Gets Results

Cognitive control enables executives to pursue a goal despite distractions and setbacks. The same neural circuitry that allows such a single-minded pursuit of goals also manages unruly emotions. Good cognitive control can be seen in people who stay calm in a crisis, tame their own agitation, and recover from a debacle or defeat.

Decades’ worth of research demonstrates the singular importance of willpower to leadership success. Particularly compelling is a longitudinal study tracking the fates of all 1,037 children born during a single year in the 1970s in the New Zealand city of Dunedin. For several years during childhood the children were given a battery of tests of willpower, including the psychologist Walter Mischel’s legendary “marshmallow test”—a choice between eating one marshmallow right away and getting two by waiting 15 minutes. In Mischel’s experiments, roughly a third of children grab the marshmallow on the spot, another third hold out for a while longer, and a third manage to make it through the entire quarter hour.

Executives who can effectively focus on others emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank.

Years later, when the children in the Dunedin study were in their 30s and all but 4% of them had been tracked down again, the researchers found that those who’d had the cognitive control to resist the marshmallow longest were significantly healthier, more successful financially, and more law-abiding than the ones who’d been unable to hold out at all. In fact, statistical analysis showed that a child’s level of self-control was a more powerful predictor of financial success than IQ, social class, or family circumstance.

How we focus holds the key to exercising willpower, Mischel says. Three subvarieties of cognitive control are at play when you pit self-restraint against self-gratification: the ability to voluntarily disengage your focus from an object of desire; the ability to resist distraction so that you don’t gravitate back to that object; and the ability to concentrate on the future goal and imagine how good you will feel when you achieve it. As adults the children of Dunedin may have been held hostage to their younger selves, but they need not have been, because the power to focus can be developed. (See the sidebar “Learning Self-Restraint.”)

Learning Self-Restraint

Quick, now. Here’s a test of cognitive control. In what direction is the middle arrow in each row pointing?

The test, called the Eriksen Flanker Task, gauges your susceptibility to distraction. When it’s taken under laboratory conditions, differences of a thousandth of a second can be detected in the speed with which subjects perceive which direction the middle arrows are pointing. The stronger their cognitive control, the less susceptible they are to distraction.

Interventions to strengthen cognitive control can be as unsophisticated as a game of Simon Says or Red Light—any exercise in which you are asked to stop on cue. Research suggests that the better a child gets at playing Musical Chairs, the stronger his or her prefrontal wiring for cognitive control will become.

Operating on a similarly simple principle is a social and emotional learning (SEL) method that’s used to strengthen cognitive control in schoolchildren across the United States. When confronted by an upsetting problem, the children are told to think of a traffic signal. The red light means stop, calm down, and think before you act. The yellow light means slow down and think of several possible solutions. The green light means try out a plan and see how it works. Thinking in these terms allows the children to shift away from amygdala-driven impulses to prefrontal-driven deliberate behavior.

It’s never too late for adults to strengthen these circuits as well. Daily sessions of mindfulness practice work in a way similar to Musical Chairs and SEL. In these sessions you focus your attention on your breathing and practice tracking your thoughts and feelings without getting swept away by them. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered, you simply return it to your breath. It sounds easy—but try it for 10 minutes, and you’ll find there’s a learning curve.

Focusing on Others

The word “attention” comes from the Latin attendere, meaning “to reach toward.” This is a perfect definition of focus on others, which is the foundation of empathy and of an ability to build social relationships—the second and third pillars of emotional intelligence.

Executives who can effectively focus on others are easy to recognize. They are the ones who find common ground, whose opinions carry the most weight, and with whom other people want to work. They emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank.

The empathy triad.

We talk about empathy most commonly as a single attribute. But a close look at where leaders are focusing when they exhibit it reveals three distinct kinds, each important for leadership effectiveness:

cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another person’s perspective;

emotional empathy—the ability to feel what someone else feels;

empathic concern—the ability to sense what another person needs from you.

Cognitive empathy enables leaders to explain themselves in meaningful ways—a skill essential to getting the best performance from their direct reports. Contrary to what you might expect, exercising cognitive empathy requires leaders to think about feelings rather than to feel them directly.

An inquisitive nature feeds cognitive empathy. As one successful executive with this trait puts it, “I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, and what didn’t work.” But cognitive empathy is also an outgrowth of self-awareness. The executive circuits that allow us to think about our own thoughts and to monitor the feelings that flow from them let us apply the same reasoning to other people’s minds when we choose to direct our attention that way.

Emotional empathy is important for effective mentoring, managing clients, and reading group dynamics. It springs from ancient parts of the brain beneath the cortex—the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the orbitofrontal cortex—that allow us to feel fast without thinking deeply. They tune us in by arousing in our bodies the emotional states of others: I literally feel your pain. My brain patterns match up with yours when I listen to you tell a gripping story. As Tania Singer, the director of the social neuroscience department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, says, “You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.” Accessing your capacity for emotional empathy depends on combining two kinds of attention: a deliberate focus on your own echoes of someone else’s feelings and an open awareness of that person’s face, voice, and other external signs of emotion. (See the sidebar “When Empathy Needs to Be Learned.”)

When Empathy Needs to Be Learned

Emotional empathy can be developed. That’s the conclusion suggested by research conducted with physicians by Helen Riess, the director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. To help the physicians monitor themselves, she set up a program in which they learned to focus using deep, diaphragmatic breathing and to cultivate a certain detachment—to watch an interaction from the ceiling, as it were, rather than being lost in their own thoughts and feelings. “Suspending your own involvement to observe what’s going on gives you a mindful awareness of the interaction without being completely reactive,” says Riess. “You can see if your own physiology is charged up or balanced. You can notice what’s transpiring in the situation.” If a doctor realizes that she’s feeling irritated, for instance, that may be a signal that the patient is bothered too.

Those who are utterly at a loss may be able to prime emotional empathy essentially by faking it until they make it, Riess adds. If you act in a caring way—looking people in the eye and paying attention to their expressions, even when you don’t particularly want to—you may start to feel more engaged.

Empathic concern, which is closely related to emotional empathy, enables you to sense not just how people feel but what they need from you. It’s what you want in your doctor, your spouse—and your boss. Empathic concern has its roots in the circuitry that compels parents’ attention to their children. Watch where people’s eyes go when someone brings an adorable baby into a room, and you’ll see this mammalian brain center leaping into action.

Research suggests that as people rise through the ranks, their ability to maintain personal connections suffers.

One neural theory holds that the response is triggered in the amygdala by the brain’s radar for sensing danger and in the prefrontal cortex by the release of oxytocin, the chemical for caring. This implies that empathic concern is a double-edged feeling. We intuitively experience the distress of another as our own. But in deciding whether we will meet that person’s needs, we deliberately weigh how much we value his or her well-being.

Getting this intuition-deliberation mix right has great implications. Those whose sympathetic feelings become too strong may themselves suffer. In the helping professions, this can lead to compassion fatigue; in executives, it can create distracting feelings of anxiety about people and circumstances that are beyond anyone’s control. But those who protect themselves by deadening their feelings may lose touch with empathy. Empathic concern requires us to manage our personal distress without numbing ourselves to the pain of others. (See the sidebar “When Empathy Needs to Be Controlled.”)

When Empathy Needs to Be Controlled

Getting a grip on our impulse to empathize with other people’s feelings can help us make better decisions when someone’s emotional flood threatens to overwhelm us.

Ordinarily, when we see someone pricked with a pin, our brains emit a signal indicating that our own pain centers are echoing that distress. But physicians learn in medical school to block even such automatic responses. Their attentional anesthetic seems to be deployed by the temporal-parietal junction and regions of the prefrontal cortex, a circuit that boosts concentration by tuning out emotions. That’s what is happening in your brain when you distance yourself from others in order to stay calm and help them. The same neural network kicks in when we see a problem in an emotionally overheated environment and need to focus on looking for a solution. If you’re talking with someone who is upset, this system helps you understand the person’s perspective intellectually by shifting from the heart-to-heart of emotional empathy to the head-to-heart of cognitive empathy.

What’s more, some lab research suggests that the appropriate application of empathic concern is critical to making moral judgments. Brain scans have revealed that when volunteers listened to tales of people subjected to physical pain, their own brain centers for experiencing such pain lit up instantly. But if the story was about psychological suffering, the higher brain centers involved in empathic concern and compassion took longer to activate. Some time is needed to grasp the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we are, the less we can cultivate the subtler forms of empathy and compassion.

Building relationships.

People who lack social sensitivity are easy to spot—at least for other people. They are the clueless among us. The CFO who is technically competent but bullies some people, freezes out others, and plays favorites—but when you point out what he has just done, shifts the blame, gets angry, or thinks that you’re the problem—is not trying to be a jerk; he’s utterly unaware of his shortcomings.

Social sensitivity appears to be related to cognitive empathy. Cognitively empathic executives do better at overseas assignments, for instance, presumably because they quickly pick up implicit norms and learn the unique mental models of a new culture. Attention to social context lets us act with skill no matter what the situation, instinctively follow the universal algorithm for etiquette, and behave in ways that put others at ease. (In another age this might have been called good manners.)

Circuitry that converges on the anterior hippocampus reads social context and leads us intuitively to act differently with, say, our college buddies than with our families or our colleagues. In concert with the deliberative prefrontal cortex, it squelches the impulse to do something inappropriate. Accordingly, one brain test for sensitivity to context assesses the function of the hippocampus. The University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson hypothesizes that people who are most alert to social situations exhibit stronger activity and more connections between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex than those who just can’t seem to get it right.

What Makes a Leader?

The same circuits may be at play when we map social networks in a group—a skill that lets us navigate the relationships in those networks well. People who excel at organizational influence can not only sense the flow of personal connections but also name the people whose opinions hold most sway, and so focus on persuading those who will persuade others.

Alarmingly, research suggests that as people rise through the ranks and gain power, their ability to perceive and maintain personal connections tends to suffer a sort of psychic attrition. In studying encounters between people of varying status, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at Berkeley, has found that higher-ranking individuals consistently focus their gaze less on lower-ranking people and are more likely to interrupt or to monopolize the conversation.

In fact, mapping attention to power in an organization gives a clear indication of hierarchy: The longer it takes Person A to respond to Person B, the more relative power Person A has. Map response times across an entire organization, and you’ll get a remarkably accurate chart of social standing. The boss leaves e-mails unanswered for hours; those lower down respond within minutes. This is so predictable that an algorithm for it—called automated social hierarchy detection—has been developed at Columbia University. Intelligence agencies reportedly are applying the algorithm to suspected terrorist gangs to piece together chains of influence and identify central figures.

But the real point is this: Where we see ourselves on the social ladder sets the default for how much attention we pay. This should be a warning to top executives, who need to respond to fast-moving competitive situations by tapping the full range of ideas and talents within an organization. Without a deliberate shift in attention, their natural inclination may be to ignore smart ideas from the lower ranks.

Focusing on the Wider World

Leaders with a strong outward focus are not only good listeners but also good questioners. They are visionaries who can sense the far-flung consequences of local decisions and imagine how the choices they make today will play out in the future. They are open to the surprising ways in which seemingly unrelated data can inform their central interests. Melinda Gates offered up a cogent example when she remarked on 60 Minutes that her husband was the kind of person who would read an entire book about fertilizer. Charlie Rose asked, Why fertilizer? The connection was obvious to Bill Gates, who is constantly looking for technological advances that can save lives on a massive scale. “A few billion people would have to die if we hadn’t come up with fertilizer,” he replied.

Focusing on strategy.

Any business school course on strategy will give you the two main elements: exploitation of your current advantage and exploration for new ones. Brain scans that were performed on 63 seasoned business decision makers as they pursued or switched between exploitative and exploratory strategies revealed the specific circuits involved. Not surprisingly, exploitation requires concentration on the job at hand, whereas exploration demands open awareness to recognize new possibilities. But exploitation is accompanied by activity in the brain’s circuitry for anticipation and reward. In other words, it feels good to coast along in a familiar routine. When we switch to exploration, we have to make a deliberate cognitive effort to disengage from that routine in order to roam widely and pursue fresh paths.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” wrote the economist Herbert Simon in 1971.

What keeps us from making that effort? Sleep deprivation, drinking, stress, and mental overload all interfere with the executive circuitry used to make the cognitive switch. To sustain the outward focus that leads to innovation, we need some uninterrupted time in which to reflect and refresh our focus.

The wellsprings of innovation.

In an era when almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from putting ideas together in novel ways and asking smart questions that open up untapped potential. Moments before we have a creative insight, the brain shows a third-of-a-second spike in gamma waves, indicating the synchrony of far-flung brain cells. The more neurons firing in sync, the bigger the spike. Its timing suggests that what’s happening is the formation of a new neural network—presumably creating a fresh association.

But it would be making too much of this to see gamma waves as a secret to creativity. A classic model of creativity suggests how the various modes of attention play key roles. First we prepare our minds by gathering a wide variety of pertinent information, and then we alternate between concentrating intently on the problem and letting our minds wander freely. Those activities translate roughly into vigilance, when while immersing ourselves in all kinds of input, we remain alert for anything relevant to the problem at hand; selective attention to the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, in which we allow our minds to associate freely and the solution to emerge spontaneously. (That’s why so many fresh ideas come to people in the shower or out for a walk or a run.)

The dubious gift of systems awareness.

If people are given a quick view of a photo of lots of dots and asked to guess how many there are, the strong systems thinkers in the group tend to make the best estimates. This skill shows up in those who are good at designing software, assembly lines, matrix organizations, or interventions to save failing ecosystems—it’s a very powerful gift indeed. After all, we live within extremely complex systems. But, suggests the Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (a cousin of Sacha’s), in a small but significant number of people, a strong systems awareness is coupled with an empathy deficit—a blind spot for what other people are thinking and feeling and for reading social situations. For that reason, although people with a superior systems understanding are organizational assets, they are not necessarily effective leaders.

An executive at one bank explained to me that it has created a separate career ladder for systems analysts so that they can progress in status and salary on the basis of their systems smarts alone. That way, the bank can consult them as needed while recruiting leaders from a different pool—one containing people with emotional intelligence.

Putting It All Together

For those who don’t want to end up similarly compartmentalized, the message is clear. A focused leader is not the person concentrating on the three most important priorities of the year, or the most brilliant systems thinker, or the one most in tune with the corporate culture. Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their inner feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they understand what others need from them, they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.

Primal Leadership

This is challenging. But if great leadership were a paint-by-numbers exercise, great leaders would be more common. Practically every form of focus can be strengthened. What it takes is not talent so much as diligence—a willingness to exercise the attention circuits of the brain just as we exercise our analytic skills and other systems of the body.

The link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time. Yet attention is the basis of the most essential of leadership skills—emotional, organizational, and strategic intelligence. And never has it been under greater assault. The constant onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts—triaging our e-mail by reading only the subject lines, skipping many of our voice mails, skimming memos and reports. Not only do our habits of attention make us less effective, but the sheer volume of all those messages leaves us too little time to reflect on what they really mean. This was foreseen more than 40 years ago by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon. Information “consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote in 1971. “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

My goal here is to place attention center stage so that you can direct it where you need it when you need it. Learn to master your attention, and you will be in command of where you, and your organization, focus.

Directing attention where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership. Below, Daniel Goleman considers how leadership hinges on capturing and directing the collective attention, and argues that new strategy means reorienting from business as usual to a fresh focus.

How Leaders Direct Attention

“Death by PowerPoint” refers to those endless, meandering presentations that the software seems to encourage. Those presentations can be painful when they reflect a lack of focused thinking, and a poor sense of what matters. One sign of the ability to pinpoint what’s salient is how someone answers the simple question, What’s your main point?

Directing attention where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership. Talent here lies in the ability to shift attention to the right place at the right time, sensing trends and emerging realities and seizing opportunities. But it’s not just the focus of a single strategic decision-maker that makes or breaks a company: it’s the entire array of attention bandwidth and dexterity among everyone.1

Sheer numbers of people make an organization’s cumulative attention far more distributable than an individual’s, with a division of labor in who pays attention to what. This multiple focus powers an organization’s attention capacity for reading and responding to complex systems.

Attention in organizations, as with individuals, has a limited capacity. Organizations, too, have to choose where to allocate attention, focusing on this, while ignoring that. An organization’s core functions—finance, marketing, human resources, and the like—describe how a particular group focuses.

Signs of what might be called organizational “attention deficit disorder” include making flawed decisions because of missing data, no time for reflection, trouble getting attention in the marketplace, and inability to focus when and where it matters.

Leadership itself hinges on effectively capturing and directing the collective attention. Leading attention requires these elements: first, focusing your own attention, then attracting and directing attention from others, and getting and keeping the attention of employees and peers, of customers or clients.

A well-focused leader can balance an inner focus on the climate and culture with other focus on the competitive landscape, and an outer focus on the larger realities that shape the environment the outfit operates in.

A leader’s field of attention—that is, the particular issues and goals she focuses on—guides the attention of those who follow her, whether or not the leader explicitly articulates them. People make their choices about where to focus based on their perception of what matters to leaders. This ripple effect gives leaders an extra load of responsibility: they are guiding not just their own attention, but to a large extent, everyone else’s.2

Take, as a case in point, strategy. An organization’s strategy represents the desired pattern of organizational attention, on which everyone should share a degree of focus, each in their particular way.3 A given strategy makes choices about what to ignore and what matters: Market share or profit? Current competitors or potential ones? Which new technologies? When leaders choose strategy, they are guiding attention.

 Where Does Strategy Come From?

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, after having been ousted in 1984, he found a company with a sea of products— computers, peripheral products for computers, twelve different types of Macintosh. The company was floundering. His strategy was simple: focus.

Attention in organizations, as with individuals, has a limited capacity. Organizations, too, have to choose where to allocate attention.

Instead of dozens of products, they would concentrate on just four: one computer and one laptop each for two markets, consumer and professional. Just as in his Zen practice, where recognizing you’ve become distracted helps you concentrate, he saw that “[d] eciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”4

Jobs was relentless in filtering out what he considered irrelevancies, both personally and in his own life. But he knew that in order to simplify effectively you need to understand the complexity that you are reducing. A single decision to simplify, like Jobs’s dictum that Apple products allow a user to do anything in three clicks or less, demanded a deep understanding of the function of the commands and buttons being given up, and finding elegant alternatives.

The original meaning of strategy was from the battlefield; it meant “the art of the leader”—back then, generals. Strategy was how you deployed your resources; tactics were how battles were fought. Today, leaders need to generate strategies that make sense in whatever larger systems they operate in—a task for outer focus.

A new strategy means reorienting from what’s now business as usual to a fresh focus. Coming up with a radically innovative strategy demands perceiving a novel position, one your competitors do not see. Winning tactics are available to everyone, yet are overlooked by all but a few.

Armies of consultants offer elaborate analytic tools for fine- tuning a strategy. But they stop cold when it comes to answering the big question: Where does a winning strategy come from in the first place? A classic article on strategy makes this offhand remark and leaves it at that: to find winning strategies “requires creativity and insight.”5

Those two ingredients take both inner and outer focus. When Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, first realized the potential for cloud computing, he was monitoring the evolution of a system-changing technology—an outer focus—along with his own gut sense of how a company offering such services would do. Salesforce uses the cloud to help companies manage their customer relationships, and it staked out an early position in this competitive space.

The best leaders have systems awareness, helping them answer the constant query, ‘Where should we head and how?’ The self-mastery and social skills built on self and other focus combine to build the emotional intelligence that drives the human engine needed to get there. A leader needs to check a potential strategic choice against everything she knows. And once the strategic choice gets made, it needs to be communicated with passion and skill, drawing on cognitive and emotional empathy. But those personal skills alone will flounder if they lack strategic wisdom.

If you think in a systems way,” says Larry Brilliant, “that drives how you deal with values, vision, mission, strategy, goals, tactics, deliverables, evaluation, and the feedback loop that restarts the whole process.

The Telling Detail On the Horizon

By the mid-2000s, the BlackBerry had become the darling of corporate IT. Companies loved that the system ran on its own closed network, reliable, fast, and secure. They handed them out to employees by the thousands, and the word crackberry (for the addiction of users to their BlackBerrys) entered the lexicon. The company rose to market dominance on four key strengths: ease of typing, excellent security, long battery life, and wireless data compression.

For a time the BlackBerry was a winning technology, changing the rules of the game by displacing competitors (in this case, some functions of PCs and laptops, and, entirely, that era’s mobile phones). But even as BlackBerrys dominated the corporate market and were fast becoming a consumer fad, the world was changing. The iPhone ushered in an epoch where more and more workers bought their own brands of smartphones—not necessarily BlackBerrys—and companies adapted by letting employees bring their devices to the company network. Suddenly BlackBerry’s lock on the corporate market evaporated, as they had to compete with everyone else.

Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian-based maker of the BlackBerry, was slow to catch up. When they introduced a touch-screen, for example, it was no match for those long on the market. BlackBerry’s closed network, once an asset, became a liability in a world where phones themselves—the iPhone, and those based on the Android operating system—had become platforms for their own worlds of apps.

RIM was run by co-CEOs who were both engineers, and the brand’s initial success was built on superior engineering. After RIM’s co-CEOs were forced out by their board, the company announced it would once again focus on companies as their prime market, even though most of its growth had come on the consumer side.

As Thorsten Heins, the new RIM CEO, put it, the company had missed major paradigm shifts in its ecological niche. They had ignored the move in the United States to fourth-generation (4G) wireless networks, failing to build devices for it even as their competitors seized that market. They underestimated how popular the iPhone’s touchscreen would become and stuck to their keyboard.

“If you have a great touch interface, people are actually willing to sacrifice battery life,” Heins says. “We thought that wouldn’t happen. Same thing with security,” as companies changed their standards to allow workers to join corporate networks with their own smartphones.6

While once the BlackBerry brand had seemed revolutionary, now, as one analyst put it, they “seemed clueless about what customers wanted.” 7

The best leaders have systems awareness, helping them answer the constant query, ‘Where should we head and how?

Though it continued to lead in markets like Indonesia, just five years after the BlackBerry dominated the American market RIM had lost 75 percent of its market value. As I write this, RIM has announced a last-ditch attempt to recoup market share with a new phone. But RIM may have entered a chapter in a company’s life that could be fatal—a “valley of death.”

That phrase comes from Andrew Grove, the legendary founding CEO of Intel, who recounts a near-death moment in his company’s history. In its early years Intel made silicon chips for what was then the fledgling computer industry. As Grove tells it, top management was oblivious to messages coming from their own sales force telling them that customers were shifting in droves to cheaper chips being made in Japan.

If Intel had not happened to have a side business in microprocessors—which became the ubiquitous “Intel Inside” in the heyday of laptops—the company would have died. But back then, Grove admits, Intel suffered from a “strategic dissonance,” in shifting from making memory chips—its first business success—to designing microprocessors.

The name of Grove’s book—Only the Paranoid Survive—tacitly nods to the necessity of vigilance, scanning for the telling detail on the horizon. This holds true in particular for the tech sector, where super-short product cycles (compared to, say, refrigerators) make the pace of innovation brutal.

The rapid-fire cycle of product innovations in the tech sector makes it a handy source of case studies (somewhat akin to the role that frenetically procreating, short-lived fruit flies play in genetics). In gaming, Nintendo’s remote controller Wii grabbed the market from Sony’s PlayStation 2; Google blew away Yahoo’s supremacy as the favored portal to the Web. Microsoft, which at one point had a 42 percent market share for mobile phone operating systems, saw iPhone earnings mushroom to dwarf the total revenue of Microsoft. Innovations rearrange our sense of what’s possible

 

Think Different

RIM during its difficult days offers a textbook example of organizational rigidity, where a company that thrives by being the first to market a new technological twist falls behind successive tech waves because their focus fixates on the old new thing, not the next. An organization that focuses inwardly may execute superbly. But if it has not attuned to the larger world in which it operates, that execution may end up in the service of a failed strategy.

An organization that focuses inwardly may execute superbly. But if it has not attuned to the larger world in which it operates, that execution may end up in the service of a failed strategy.

Any business school course on strategy will tell you about two approaches: exploitation and exploration. Some people—and some businesses like RIM—succeed through a strategy of exploitation, where they refine and learn how to improve an existing capacity, technology, or business model. Others find their road to success through exploration, by experimenting with innovative alternatives to what they do now.

Those who exploit can find a safer path to profits, while those who explore can potentially find a far greater success in the next new thing—though the risks of failure are greater, and the horizon of payback further away. Exploitation is the tortoise, exploration the hare.

The best decision-makers are ambidextrous in their balance of the two, knowing when to switch from one to the other. They can lead switch-hitting organizations, which are, for instance, good at seeking growth by simultaneously innovating and containing costs—two very different operations. Kodak was superb at analog photography but stumbled in the new competitive reality of digital cameras.

Danger here abounds during a business downturn, when companies understandably focus on surviving and meeting their numbers by cutting costs—but often at the expense of caring for their people or keeping up with how the world has changed. Being in survival mode narrows our focus.

Apple’s slogan “think different” dictates a switch to exploration. Moving into new territory rather than hunkering down to increase efficiency is more than a contrast in stances—at the level of the brain the two represent entirely different mental functions and neural mechanisms. Attention control holds the key for decision-makers needing to make the switch.