Achieving 100 percent productivity is an aspirational goal for most of us but figuring out how to stay focused at work often gets in the way of achieving it. There are obvious answers if you ask the internet how to focus at work: don’t check your phone, listen to meditative music, or just remind yourself that work is a priority and focus will come to you naturally. It is rarely, if ever, that simple. Understanding how to stay focused and productive at work takes active effort and planning but the rewards can be extremely satisfying.
(Image Credits – Freepik)
Juliety states that workers experience approximately 15 interruptions per hour worked. To clarify, workers get distracted every four minutes while working, which is a pretty low bar to cross in our mission of learning how to focus at work. With so many distractions hampering your work, it is evident that active work is necessary to develop your attention span at work.
How to Stay Focused at Work? Identify What’s Interrupting Your Focus
You cannot begin working on your game plan to address how to stay focused and productive at work if you don’t fully acknowledge what is keeping you distracted. A study by Reviews.org found that in a day, Americans look at their mobiles approximately 144 times, with 75 percent of them checking their phones within five minutes of receiving a notification. The internet is not wrong, we do use our phones constantly and immediately once it catches our attention. But blaming our phones for being the sole reason we struggle with staying focused at work is also unfair.
Studies also found that 99 percent of employees complained that unexpected interruptions in the workplace were their main issue, with coworkers, office noise, and emails also interrupting their workflow. Identifying these problem areas can give us a more definitive idea of how to deal with them, and increase our attention span at work. If phones are the main issue, we can set limits on phone use during work hours and restrict its usage to breaks. If coworkers are the main culprit, it might again be beneficial to restrict their interactions to the break time unless they have work for you.
Tips on How to Focus at Work
Once you establish what is distracting or impeding your attention span at work, you can begin to plot out how to stay focused at work. A wide plan can be narrowed down into smaller goals and priorities.
Track Your Daily Activity
Evaluate your current status to begin working towards improving your focus at work. Establish a starting point by tracking how long you can focus, what your primary distractions are, how frequently you take breaks, what you do on the breaks, whether you’re able to concentrate once you return from the breaks, etc.
You might think you are easily distracted but your activity levels might show you that you are quite on track towards being productive. Still, if you want to continue to work on how to stay focused and productive at work, then exploring how to deep work might be right for you.
Explore How to Deep Work
Defined by Professor Cal Newport in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, deep work refers to uninterrupted, fully focused work hours that are entirely distraction-free. Everyone is familiar with the story of Bill Gates and his “think weeks” where he would take a week off to completely disconnect from the rest of the world to focus on the generation of new ideas. While a week away to work more is not in the cards for everyone, the essence of deep work is to encourage a single-minded focus on the task at hand.
Psychology Today reported that you could lose up to 40 percent of productivity while trying to multitask. Bryan College even found that multitasking could kill your IQ by 15 points. The results are conclusive—multitasking is not all that it was made out to be. Focusing on a single task at a time and giving it all your full attention might be what you need to learn how to do deep work and focus at work. Some of the ways to encourage the habit include:
- Setting an hour in the day for a task of priority and scheduling the rest around it
- Working on one assignment at a time
- Following a train of thought/task to the end instead of getting distracted by other responsibilities
- Asking coworkers to email you about additional details instead of approaching you during your scheduled time-out
Aim to Increase Attention Span at Work
To be able to successfully do deep work, you need to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. The Treetop Therapy platform reports that the average attention span is only 8.25 seconds—less than the 9 seconds of the goldfish we mock in our metaphors. With social media and other sources of immediate gratification on the rise, it is quite difficult for us to concentrate these days but it is not impossible. If we sit through a sports match or watch a whole movie in a theater without checking our phones, we haven’t entirely lost our ability to concentrate.
To increase your attention span at work, analyze and minimize the distractors in your vicinity.
- Turning off notifications on your phone, at least for a while
- Closing open tabs that do not pertain to the task at hand
- Keeping all your resources ready in one place before you begin a task
- Using breathing techniques and other mechanisms that can help you clear your mind if distractions do appear
- Keeping a notebook to file away any distracting thoughts until you finish the task in from of you
- Clearing clutter from your workspace to eliminate distractors
- Using noise-canceling headphones if they are allowed at your work
Create Rituals
If you are committed to learning how to stay focused at work, you might benefit from setting up work rituals that allow you to streamline your work process. By following a routine, not only will you know what to expect from your day, but you should also be able to flow from one task to the next with ease.
- Understand your tasks and prioritize what you need to focus on. Use Eisenhower’s Important and Urgent Principle to determine what you need to work on first.
- Set up a schedule for your day. Understand when you are most productive and assign demanding tasks for that period
- Plan realistically. If you know you have a work meeting at 11, you will also know you need 10 minutes to get to the room and set up. Plan work around it accordingly.
- Include simple rituals. Comforting tasks and rituals such as getting some fresh air or filling up your water bottle before you sit down for a long call can trigger your brain into preparing for a routine task.
- Choose the right workspace. If you have the option of moving around, decide where your productivity is likely to be at its highest and return there when you want to stay focused and productive at work.
Schedule Breaks
Knowing what the average attention span is, it is unreasonable to force a longer attention span by just sitting at your desk for long periods. Try and get as much done but also schedule breaks to stretch your legs, get some air, talk to someone other than your computer, or rest your eyes from the bright screens. Breaks are necessary and there is an art to taking them as well.
- Be reasonable about your breaks. You might not be able to walk to the nearest coffee shop and back in 10 minutes so a break where you’re rushing around is no break at all. Be realistic about what you can do.
- Do not overstimulate your brain. It can be very tempting to call it a break and watch 15 minutes of your new favorite show. However, it’ll be much harder to focus at work, with your mind on where you left off the episode.
- Avoid technology. A break from your computer to look at your phone doesn’t really help you actually take a break. Choose to get some movement in instead.
- Disconnect from work once you log out. This one is difficult to pull off but this break is just as important. Prioritize your time away from work so you can stay focused and productive at work once you get back.
Apps Are Not Your Enemies
Productivity tools and apps are very useful additions to your planning on how to stay focused at work. These tools are designed to fill in the gap in your current ability to be productive, whether it is to block off social media or to send you reminders about important tasks. Use the support these tools can provide to increase your attention span at work and refine your deep work.
- Forest App: Allows you to grow a tree on your phone while you work, temporarily restricting you from accessing distracting apps on your phone.
- Todoist: Allows you to organize your tasks in a clear, uncluttered format
- Serene App: Specifically for Mac users, the tool allows you to block digital distractions and increase your attention span at work.
- MindMeister: This mind-mapping tool can help you get your thoughts in order and plan out your projects with efficiency.
- Habitica: For those who like gamified experiences, Habitica is a habit tracker that allows you to create to-do lists while also hatching eggs and developing your in-app persona.
- Doodle: This service allows team activity scheduling with ease for those who need to collaborate with multiple parties.
- Basecamp: This project management software can simplify project collaboration to make your work easier and help your team cycle through tasks quickly.
- Trackabi: This tool makes time tracking a much more engaging process rather than setting up any other timers.
Figuring out how to stay focused and productive at work is a difficult task with the number of distractions and experiences we are constantly bombarded by. Especially with work-from-home alternatives, it can be very appealing to laze around or ignore a notification instead of working. However, if you have the desire to increase how efficiently you stay focused at work, then this article should give you all you need to get started.