Organize Your Tasks Before Worrying About Your Ability to Focus
When you look at your computer screen and wonder why you can’t just force yourself to do what you need to do, it’s easy to blame your focus. If you’re disorganized and don’t really have a plan, you may have a bigger problem.
As pointed out by the Harvard Business Review business website, one of the quickest distractions is to try to work when you have little understanding of what you need to do anyway. If you sit down at the table with a plan to “finish this project,” it will be vague and useless. The scheduling of the “TPS Report Refinement” is more specific. If you don’t have the details, you need a plan. Once you have a plan, you can organize each task at the most productive times of the day to get it done:
Instead of trying to achieve what’s important, you can take advantage of your body’s natural rhythms. Focus on difficult, creative tasks in the morning; these things, as a rule, you do individually or with 2-3 other people. Reschedule all other appointments for the afternoon. These simpler, execution-oriented meetings with large groups are easier to handle.
Sometimes all you really need to get moving is knowing where you are going. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily make a big project overwhelming, but at least you can stop staring at a blank page wondering why the finished project didn’t materialize out of nowhere. Get organized first and then you can worry about your attention.
Two Things That Kill Your Ability to Focus | Harvard Business Review