Why You’re Always Distracted - 5 Mistakes Ruining Your Focus

Being able to not be

distracted

is truly one of the most life-changing skills if we want to improve our lives in some way, if we want to make progress in our studies, in our work, in our side hustle or even if we like to be present with our Families, for God's sake, everything requires this magical ability called

focus

, it requires the ability to

focus

on one thing and one thing only and be completely present in doing that damn thing, the thing is, we are bombarded by distractions all the time. we have our social media notifications pinging from right to left and in the middle we have messages and emails and whatsapps and text messages and it's so easy to get

distracted

these days with all the endless options we have available and the reason why I think en It is incredibly important to cultivate the ability to concentrate and this is what I have really realized over the years: the quality of my life is directly proportional to my ability to concentrate and I have had periods in my life where I've really, really, had a hard time concentrating.

My first year of medical school, for example, was a year where I really had a hard time concentrating. I was burning until midnight. I was feeling really overwhelmed. I was feeling really very stressed. I didn't even do that well on my exams. I started researching more about productivity, you know, reading articles about it, doing an additional degree in Psychology, and I realized that there are actually a lot of different techniques that we can learn to help us focus better and if we can learn. and applying those techniques greatly improves the quality of our life, so in this video we will go over the five key

mistakes

that distract us and we can't concentrate and let's start with mistake number one.

There was one thing I read that really made this mistake dawn on me and that was when I read Near Eel's book, Indestructible, this is a book about how to be indestructible and how to avoid distractions and all that kind of fun stuff and we're probably going to I'll do a video on this at some point, but right at the beginning of the book it says something really profound, which is that the opposite of distraction is traction and traction is when you're intentionally doing something to move where you want. you want to go and distraction is when you are doing something that takes you away from where you want to go, but the next thing he says is that to really know what it is that you want to do and what it is that you want to avoid it, you have to have a plan because if You don't have a plan, you can't get distracted because you never had a plan.

To begin with, distraction occurs when we intend to do one thing and then find ourselves doing something. more and that's why the number one mistake that we all make and that I make all the time when I get distracted is simply not having a plan when you don't have a plan and you sit in front of

your

computer or phone with nothing on Keep in mind what you really you want to do and that's when you're going to end up doing all the other little things. This is what social media platforms are designed to do. When you go on a social media platform that you don't normally go on.

I do it with a particular goal in mind, it's like someone who is just browsing. I'm going to go to YouTube and see what happens. I am literally outsourcing the decision of how I am going to spend my time. It is the most valuable resource I have. I'm outsourcing that decision to a team of thousands of developers whose goal is to keep me on the platform as long as possible and show me ads for as long as possible so that the platform can make money. I like the team behind YouTube. I have met some of them, they are very nice people, but those are the incentives of these social media platforms, so the key is that we need to make a plan to avoid getting distracted and the biggest mistake people make that makes them to be distracted is to not have a plan.

This is something N also talks about in his book. He says, "You know" every time people come to me and tell me I'm struggling. distraction I have a hard time being distracted, he says, show me

your

calendar and show me what you were, what you intended to do in that block of time. If you don't use a calendar, you should start using it because it's a game changer because it's Lally. record what you intend to do and B if you have created a block of time, let's say in this time block of hours I intend to write my PowerPoint presentation or I intend to work on my book or I intend to film a video or I intend to study for the exam, whatever it is, once it's there as an intention, now you can have traction and move towards it and the remarkable thing about the human brain is that when we set an intention when we set a goal for something, we're much more likely to use all the weird, all the relevant resources and kind of mental faculties to get there, whereas if we don't set a goal, we'll just end up sort of drifting.

Now, once you've mastered the ability to focus and not get distracted, one of the things you'll have to figure out is what you really want to do with all that free time you and I have. I know many people in my audience are aspiring content creators or current content creators. If you are in the world of content creation in any capacity then one thing that can really help you with video ideas, titles, thumbnails or scripts is Generative AI which is becoming more and more important and if you want to get more information on using AI for your YouTube channel or content creative business, I would really recommend checking out the completely free ebook written by hopspot called using generative AI to scale your content. operations, there's a link in the description of the video that you can download completely free and it's an amazing guide that will help you get started with AI in terms of the different AI tools and how to write prompts for them and all the different ways to use the AI. for your content business, you'll understand how to simplify your research, how to repurpose content, and how to overcome writer's block, and my team and I have found the examples and tips, particularly for working with AI, to be particularly helpful because we're still I'm trying to figure out how to leverage AI for our content, but in a way that still keeps my voice and I like Good Vibes and authenticity and all that kind of fun stuff, but I actually use this incredibly powerful tool that we now have access to. .

The eBook was created by HubSpot, who is the sponsor of today's video, so a big thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring the video and be sure to check out the completely free resource. Okay, let's move on to mistake number two now, once you've made a plan and If you're sitting down to do whatever and you're still getting distracted by whatever, then the mistake people make is thinking that I'm just a distracted person or I just can't concentrate or you know start telling yourself these things. identity type statements that are like a key mistake uh another mistake is blaming the social media companies, sure we can blame the social media companies, we like it, but as you know, fundamentally it's our job to control our psychology and everything.

That, all that fun stuff, but Generally, when we have a plan and we get distracted it is because there is some type of negative emotion that is at the root of our distraction and therefore mistake number two is ignoring how you feel. This is a lot. It's easier for boys to do it because usually boys are very bad. I'm included in understanding how you feel about things that you may not even be aware of, there's some kind of negative feeling that you're trying to avoid, but here's a rule that I like. I like to think about my life whenever I get distracted, as long as I have a plan.

I'll just assume there's some kind of emotion I'm trying to avoid, that's all there is to it, step one, gotta? a plan and step two, okay, I have a plan and I'm getting distracted, so what's the negative emotion I'm trying to avoid right now? Broadly speaking, there are three categories of negative emotions that we try and avoid: boredom, anxiety, and doubt, again, no. Sexy things to say if you're a guy watching this, but like me, I feel anxious, insecure and have little confidence in my ability to accomplish this task, it's not something we find very easy to admit to ourselves, but it's true, Let's start with anxiety and doubt because generally the feeling of negative emotion behind these two things is fear.

I'm afraid of not being good enough. I'm afraid to do this. This happened to me a lot when I was writing my book. I really struggled because I had my block of time. I had my plan to write hundreds or thousands of words during the session, but I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of doubt about my ability to write a book. What if people don't like it? What if the reviews are bad? And if so? Why would anyone care what I have to say? All these feelings related to fear really block me and then I feel the negative emotion arise sometimes.

I would notice other times. I won't notice and it would be easier to calm myself down by opening my phone or going to YouTube and watching asmin gold TV making a video about World of Warcraft or something. that I wasn't acknowledging the fact that really the reason I was distracted was because I was avoiding this feeling of fear, this feeling of anxiety and then this feeling of doubt and, you know, the trick that I found for this was, you know? ? There are various tricks that writers come up with to overcome this block just because writers block is fundamentally like a kind of feeling that we are struggling to deal with it, but one way that I found to deal with it was just the idea of fast. bad bad FBR and it's like the goal is to do something fast, bad and bad, then great, yeah.

I am very confident in my ability to do something quickly, badly and badly and therefore the negative emotion disappears. I have a lot too. of strategies in chapter 5 of my book on how we can overcome the negative emotion of fear, but that is a big part of why we become distracted because there is some type of anxiety or doubt that we are feeling the second big part of why we become distracted. We get distracted is because the task we are trying to do is actually very, very boring. Unfortunately, we all have to do things at times that aren't a little boring.

The trick here is something I have in mind. my phone my phone wallpaper if this is in focus What would this look like if it were fun? I have it on my phone these days I usually have it as a Post-It note on my computer monitor what would this look like if it were fun? you make your work feel good, how you make it enjoyable and energizing in the book we talk about play, power and people, these are the three PDs that we can apply to any work we are doing to make it more fun because if things are a little more fun, then you are much less likely to get distracted.

Oh, and by the way, if you're interested in learning more about what Near says in the book, indistractably, you should read the book. but if you don't want to read the book, you can check the summary of that book in short form. They are not sponsoring this video, but I have an affiliate link below. They even have a summary of my book. If for some reason you don't want to read this and would prefer to read a summary of the book, you can check it out in short form. There's a link below, it's an affiliate link, but it also gives you a 20% discount.

If you feel like reading book summaries, it's my favorite source for book summaries. Now we make mistake number three and the way we understand this is a psychological concept called attention residue. This is a term that was introduced by Professor Sophie Leroy at the University of Washington in an article published in 2009. Now in her work Sophie shows that when you switch from task A to task B your attention does not follow you instantly, there is a residue of your focus that remains stuck on task a and this residue on the previous task can completely ruin your performance on the current task because your brain has not yet fully transitioned to the next task and really the issue is that our brains are not Designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention, it is much easier for us to concentrate. on one thing at a time instead of trying to split our focus on several things and therefore switching between many different tasks within a block of work can make you feel like you are doing a lot of work, but in reality it can be really counterproductive and make you distracted, so the key lesson here is that when you are doing something, do one thing at a time trying to work on your writing and also reply to lazy messages and also reply to this email and also work on this another design task that you are doing at the same time is simply not going to work, since trying to do things in parallel is generally much less efficient and much less effective than trying to do things in series, that is, just one at a time. time, the practical thing here is to, for example, deactivate notifications,Activate focus mode on your phone and all your devices.

I have the feature enabled on my Apple devices that shares focus mode between devices, so I won't even see notifications if they appear. I

always

have my phone face down on the table in front of me so I don't even see notifications and right before filming this video I opened Slack and saw that I had about 18 bad messages on Slack that I received, I was tagged and I was thinking you know what? which is fine. I'm not even going to look at them because I just know that if I look at those 1800 messages, it will cause some kind of attention residue, it will make me lose concentration, it will distract me sometimes.

What I like. What I need to do is in the middle of the day, like maybe after lunch or something where I have half an hour of empty time before the next meeting or whatever. I'll use that time to do the surface work to just go through WhatsApp and reply to things and generally wander around a bit aimlessly replying to things here and there and that's okay, but it's okay because that's the intention I've made for that block. In particular, the more intentional we can be with the blocks of time we have on our calendar and in our lives, the more likely we are to make time for the things that really matter to us.

Oh, by the way, if you're enjoying this video so far, you might. I would like to see my 7-day Focus intensive course completely free. He is in the intensive Focus course on com. It's completely free. Enter your email and then every day for 7 days, I'll send you an email containing some evidence-based principles, strategies, and tips. on how to focus more, completely free, check it out, okay, let's talk about mistake number four now, so when I was doing research for my book, I discovered a technology company called Drum Group and basically this company wanted to find out what made their products different. more productive employees from the less productive ones.

Basically, what they found was that the most productive employees worked fewer hours and took more breaks than the less productive employees, so what they did was they used a time tracking app that they installed. on all their people's devices and things and founded the group Elite Workers, that is, the top 10% in terms of productivity, they worked intensely for 52 minutes on average and then took the next 17 minutes off and within those 52 minutes They did it intensely. concentrated, deep work, single task, focusing on one thing and then in the next 17 minutes these guys were actually resting, so they weren't checking slack or checking email every 5 minutes, they were actively taking a break during that time and really like having these two numbers in mind, 52 and 17, they're kind of strange numbers, as you know.

I wish there was probably a better way to, I don't know 50 and 15 or something like that, but 5217 is a pretty reasonable ratio of Work to rest time and I certainly find it for myself whenever I'm working on something, I have music like The Lord of the Rings in the background and I can see how much time has passed in the three-hour playlist and usually when it ends. it gets to 40 50 minutes I start to feel like I want to do something else, I feel like distracting myself and I like wanting to check emails and stuff and then I look at the timer and I'm like, oh, okay, it's been 48 minutes, now it's time to take a break, okay, so there are a couple of different ways we can apply this Insight.

One way to do this is by setting an intention that for the next 45 minutes, 50 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour, you will block out a certain amount of time. where you intend to focus on that task and you don't deviate from that task during that time. I personally don't really like that style approach where I fixate on it in a fixed way, as if it gives me a fixed amount of time to do. The thing is unless I have a meeting coming up or something I have to do, in which case I'll obviously give myself a set amount of time.

In general, what I prefer to do is play the Lord of the Ring soundtrack. and then I work for as long as it takes to feel like I can make full Focus progress on that task, whatever I'm doing, and then when I get distracted or feel like doing something else I'll look at the timer and see that's it. okay, 38 minutes gone, okay, it's time to take a break and I recognize that feeling inside of me that when I feel the need to do something else that's when it's a really good time to take a break to get up to make a coffee to make a Wii to do whatever and the key thing to remember is that what you do during the break should not generate any additional obligations because If, ​​for example, you use the brakes to check your messages, checking the messages will generate a bunch of random tasks for do them and that will distract you from what you're actually trying to do next, so take a break, take a proper break, do something that doesn't create additional obligations and tasks in your time, ideally and now we come to the error number five and for most of this video, actually, throughout this video we've been talking about software problems.

You know, the way we respond to things in our brain or the way we operate are problems with software, but one of the biggest things that ruins our concentration and distracts us is problems with our hardware, i.e. our body and our brain in terms of diet and exercise and in particular sleep, this is what everyone already knows, you should sleep 8 hours a night, you should eat healthy foods, we all know what healthy foods are, eat like a Adult, don't eat like a child, ideally we should exercise every day. I found it incredibly helpful to go to the gym first thing in the morning, so, for example, this morning from 8:00 to 9:00 am. m.

I had a gym session and yesterday was leg day and the day before it was chess day, I found that going to the gym four or five times a week in the mornings is incredibly helpful for my energy levels and my ability to not be distracted during the day, unfortunately I didn't have much. I slept last night because I was watching Dune po 2 and then I got home like midnight and then my mind was spinning because I watched some video essays about the making of Dune part 2 and then I was buzzing with all the stuff and it was like, oh, okay, damn, you know my brain is on, I have to wake up to go to the gym at 7:30, damn, sleep time has been reduced and I was like, okay, great, I need to meditate, like this that I didn't get my 8. unfortunately, that's why today I know that I'm more likely to have problems related to concentration and distraction, which means I need to be even more focused and really focus on building that plan and not falling into these . other software bugs to make up for the fact that I only got about 4 and a half hours of sleep last night because I was watching videos about the second part of June, it becomes a lot easier to stay focused and not get distracted when you've taken care of the hardware stuff as well that if you're not sleeping, if you're eating like shit and if you're not exercising, of course you're going to have a hard time concentrating like you can't hope to be able to concentrate if this hardware and if your health is absolutely terrible so often when it comes to software problems, you want to deal with the hardware issue first.

One thing my friend Bloom often says is that you know there's no such thing as a woke loser. He gets up at 5:00 a.m. And he exercises, you know? When I first heard him say that, I thought, huh, are you saying everyone has to wake up at 5:00 a.m.? Get up an hour earlier and just exercise, you'll take care of yourself in a way that maybe you wouldn't otherwise and that really influences all the other areas of your life and really helps you stay focused and avoid distractions. This is why all the high-level CEOs I've talked to work out first thing in the morning, but usually when I talk to people at events and talks, I do it if someone comes up to me and says that has difficulty being distracted or having trouble staying focused and having time to talk to them about things.

I generally find that they don't exercise, they don't eat particularly well and they don't sleep particularly well, so in that case, of course, you will have difficulty concentrating and of course you will be distracted, so I would say what to look out for and what What I like to remind myself is that yes, we can have all these software problems, yes, we can install. all the applications in the world and using the focus modes and all that kind of stuff, but without the hardware without our body and our mind being in optimal condition, it will be very difficult to do all this, but if our body and our mind are in optimal conditions.

In optimal conditions, it becomes much easier to do all these things that we want to do, so I hope you got something from this video. I'd love for you to leave a comment below about something practical that you're going to do to apply in your life to not get distracted and focus better and if you're interested in hearing more, this video is actually the first in a three-part series where we're working on how to be more focused because we realize that when we survey our audience and things that, like everyone, they really have a hard time concentrating on, we're going to do more videos about that and video number two will be about some strategies and techniques that you can use and video number three goes These are my favorite tools to keep myself more focused, so those videos will be there in this little playlist that I created for you.

Thank you very much for watching and see you in the next video, bye.