How to Focus

Take time to reflect and review what you want to do today
You only got 24 hours

First thing in the morning: What are the 3 most important things to do today?
(don't check your email until you complete this task! otherwise you will lose your focus)

At the end of the day:

• 1) What did I do?
• 2) What will I focus on tomorrow?
• 3) What can be improved?

Create Rituals /Habits
Mornings: If you are starting to forget to brush your teeth in the morning, we have a problem here.
Create everyday morning habits and always do them in a specific order.

• 1) shower
• 2) have a healthy breakfast
• 3) go for a walk

Make sure you wake up with enough time so that you can read or meditate, (i.e. write your morning pages that were mentioned above!)

By creating morning habits, you are allowing your mind to have a sense of stability so that you may focus on other things.

at Bedtime, create habits that are good for your brain, body, and apartment such as:

• read 10 pages from a book, 
• wash your face face (will help with any acne), and 
• clean all your dishes/empty your sink (this will tremendously improve any mice/cockroaches problems)

Improving your life will help you improve your focus.


Manage your space

1. Stop with the multitasking! If you are reading a book, make sure it is the only thing in front of you!
2. spend 10 minutes each day decluttering
3. use an intray for incoming paper at your office/work space
4. clear away all distractions (you don't need that many tabs on your browser, if you are done with a website, close it, don't keep refreshing it every hour)

How to Work

• work in focused bursts (use a timer) and make sure you reward yourself. 
• 50 minutes of intense work (no distraction) = 20 minutes of break (the average netflix tv show with no episodes is about 21-22 minutes)
• get away from the computer (for five minutes, let your eyes wander about to relieve eye strain)
• Go to an area with no internet (this will help with any future internet withdrawals, you can't use the internet if its not there)
• use only a notepad and pen (remember a time when we JUST use paper and pen?)

Managing Email

• Create disconnection time (i.e. 8am -10 am) so that you can perform your morning rituals without interruptions
• Make sure to check email at set points in the day (2-3 times per day) [Unless you are the VP of some facing company, must you check your email every half hour after work if you were checking your email every half hour DURING work?]
• Turn off email alerts (the point is to get rid of interruptions which causes loss of focus)

take a Digital Technology Detox
Remember:

• Say Yes to People when its... Creating, Spending Time with Family & Friends, Reading a book
• Say no to time additions like Twitter, email, and Facebook

Help for Internet Addicts
Use Blocker programs to block websites mentioned above
you will gain more freedom and self control by either locking yourself out of specific websites or better yet, locking yourself out of the entire internet.

Need to write? That's not an excuse to go on the internet:
 Find a write room, use pen and paper, hell, buy a typewriter from Etsy and type from there.

You lose focus when you are constantly interrupted, by creating rituals to stabilize your mind, and by removing the stranglehold that Facebook, email alerts, the general internet has on you, you will slowly but surely gain more focus to clean your apartment, read a book, focus better on your study.

good luck!