Fueling your focus with clarity

Last month I took the radical step of taking a whole bunch of apps off my phone – Instagram, Twitter, NY Times, etc.

As many people have said and demonstrated before me, the key to mastering your life is mastering your attention. And if you don’t build your skills on this, they will atrophy. As one of my clients told me recently: “I’m not even sure if I have the stamina anymore to take two hours to review an important document.”

Maybe you can relate?

I’ve been working on my own focus these days, and I wrote this article for Forbes about how to eliminate distractions.

Some of this is good housekeeping – put your phone in airplane mode! I found one strategy particularly interesting, which I heard from Dr. Andrew Huberman. Put a target on your computer and gaze at your target for 30-90 seconds. Apparently, this raises your diastolic blood pressure, which in turn helps you focus (this elevation of your blood pressure is not dangerous.) I’ve been trying it and maybe it’s the placebo effect, but it’s been working for me.

I heard another good idea from Joe Thomas, the Co-Founder and CEO of Loom, on my podcast From Start-up to Grown-up. He noticed that he – like many people - tended to gravitate to the things he loved and were easy for him. He shied away from the things that were hard. So he tracks his time to make sure he’s giving ample focus to the areas that he knows he needs to do, like fundraising or managing someone’s performance, and not overshooting on the areas he loves, like products.

Give it a listen – you’ll enjoy this entire discussion where Joe also talks about his most effective frameworks.

What do you do to make sure you keep the most important thing the most important thing?