One day, some youths went to a jungle to practice shooting. They kept few pots at a distance and targeted them. None of them could hit even a single pot.
A saint who was watching them started laughing. One of them went to him and asked, "Why are you laughing? Do you know how to shoot?"
At this, the saint took the gun and fired at the pots and smashed all of them one by one. The youths were amazed to see this and asked the saint if he was a magician.
The saint replied, "I am neither a magician nor a sharpshooter. I just concentrated and the result is in front of you. One should always work with concentration."
You might have heard this as a Bed time story in your Child hood several times.And would have started sleeping happily.Is it that much easy to bring Concentration and complete our Tasks?
Focus Vs Brain
Focusing on a task is a lot like focusing your vision. It is essentially a top-down process. When you make the decision to focus on something, your brain first takes in all the visual information and starts to process that information to tell you what you should focus on. It’s like looking at a painting or a photograph for the first time. When the image becomes clearer, then your brain will move in on one aspect that you want to pay attention to. When you achieve that blissful kind of concentration where time slips by you, your perception of the world around you changes, allowing you to have a heightened ability to ignore outside stimuli.
How we Lose Focus?
Look at the following familiar situation. You need to study something for your job or for an exam. You sit comfortably on the sofa with the book in your hands and start reading. After a while you feel hungry and go to the kitchen to eat something.You return to read, and then hear you people talking outside. You listen to them for several moments and then bring your attention back to the book.After a while you feel restless and switch on the radio to listen to some music. You continue to read for a little while, and then remember something that happened yesterday, and you start thinking about it.When you look at your watch, you are amazed to find out that one complete hour has passed and you have hardly read anything.This is what happens when one lacks concentration. Imagine what you could have accomplished, if you could control your attention and focus your mind!
Train yourself to stay focused - Pomodoro Technique
No one can magically become more focused. It actually takes a lot of work, and it requires one of the hardest types of effort: mindfulness. However, there are tips and techniques that you can apply as you’re training yourself to become more focused.
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management process developed by Francesco Cirillo in 1992 to help him get more studying done. It uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals that are separated by 5 minute breaks. After 4 work periods you take a long 15-20 minute break. The process can be summarized by the following steps:
Choose a task-Set the timer to 25 minutes, and start working-Record progress at the end of the 25 minutes-Take a 5 minute break (15-20 minutes after 4th work period)
The technique’s author named it after the tomato shaped kitchen timer he used to keep track of his work (‘pomodoro’ is a tomato in Italian).Breaking down work into small chunks is generally a good idea; it is easier to estimate what can get done in 25 minutes, and much easier to control the urge to procrastinate when you have a very limited time to complete your task. The regular breaks also keep you feeling fresh and focused.Overall, the technique works well in certain situations but not all. Use it to get started on a new project or task that you keep putting off. Getting started is usually the hardest part, and the Pomodoro technique is a great way of getting over that inertia. If you are being productive on your own, don’t break the momentum you have with regular breaks.
Meditate
Meditation can be like training your mind’s muscles to stay focused, because it helps you become more single minded. It’s not really about sitting still for hours, especially if you’re just starting out. It can be as simple as closing your eyes and vividly imagining yourself eating an apple, taking the bites out of it and focusing on the sensations. Before you know it, 10 minutes have passed while you channelled your focus toward one thing only.
Music may be considered the language of the soul. It is probably the easiest meditation technique to use for beginners. There is a simple principle when readying oneself to meditate with music. a wide variety of music is available to us, but the most important characteristic of music for meditation, is that it is music of the heart.Music is created and performed from differing elements of our human psyche. some music is very emotional, or dry and intellectual or even aggressive and physical. Since the goal of our meditation lifestyle.
Take tech vacations
A big reason for our attention deficit as a society is technology. When your brain is confronted with two tasks that are seemingly on the same level of importance, it will choose the easier one, and technology is almost always the easier one. Even if it’s impossible to take a tech vacation because of what you do, try to be mindful of your relationship with tech. Staying connected, but have limits. Use apps thate take the edge off your online life.
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower
We have a tendency to focus on the urgent activities, without leaving enough time for to focus on the truly important tasks. This kind of busy work simply means we’re keeping our head above the water and firefighting through our to-do lists. But the meaningful things that actually lead to accomplishments are the important ones.
Task Management - The Urgent Important Matrix
Quadrant 1: Urgent/Important
Highest priority. Try to keep this list empty. If you spend too much time here, you are working solely as a trouble shooter, and never finding time to work on longer-term plans.
Quadrant 2: Not Urgent/Important Quadrant
This is where you want to spend most of your time; working on something important and have the time to do it properly. This will help you produce high quality efficiently.
Quadrant 3: Urgent/Not Important Quadrant
Consider for elimination. This is where you are busy but not productive. Tasks in this quadrant are often mistaken to be important.
Quadrant 4: Not Urgent/Not Important Quadrant
Minimize. Often we “escape” to this quadrant for survival after spending too much time in quadrants 1 and 3. This may cause quadrant 2 activities to get pushed aside until they become urgent and move to quadrant 1 — at which point its too late to do them effectively.
Using this technique for prioritization allows you to deal with the truly urgent while working towards your goals. This is where you plan properly, execute well and enjoy a stress free productive environment. However, adopting this matrix to manage your tasks is quite difficult without a properly designed application. Neither pen & paper nor traditional software (e.g word processor, spreadsheets) work well in grids.
Find your motivation – the big ‘why’
One of the reasons we can’t stay focused is fuzzy motivation. We don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing. This can be low-level – when you’re unclear why a specific task will help achieve a goal – or high-level – why you’re trying to achieve that goal in the first place. When your motivation is clear, then your attitude will change and you will transform how you work. When you are truly interested and passionate about what you do, concentration is surprisingly easy.
