Stay focused when there’s so much to do

If you’re having a hard time staying focused at work or in life in general – here are 5 tips that have helped us – someone who isn’t naturally organized and lives for distractions!

Sometimes we wonder how we even finished school being the unfocused human that we are today. But as far as we can remember we were focused at school.

We would sit down and solve our math problems like there’s nothing else to do in the world right now. Without for a second wondering whether it would be hard or not. Where did that girl go? And what happened to her mad math skills?

Now we can’t even finish a sentence without being distracted. In fact whenever we edit a blog posts we often find a half-written sentence just standing there, hanging out, waiting to be finished. But do we finish it?

No. Because like Jay Z said – we're onto the next one. There are so many things to do, learn and see in this world. Or should we say, in this computer? Phone? The internet? Cyberspace? Myspace…we're 30 something, don’t judge.

With so much information and so many tasks and goals we set for myself, it’s been hard to stay focused and to get things done, especially since we started blogging.

It’s way different than being employed – there’s nobody to check on you, yell at you, let you know you’re a big disappointment and shame on you when you don’t finish a task. It’s just you.

And us, even if we're passionate about it, even if we NEED it, even if it’s not that difficult to do, there are so many other easier options that doing the hard work is not worth it.

Except it is.

And we found a way to be more focused and to get things done, even if we're not solid at it. Here are the 5 tips that helped stay focused at work and in life.

5 Steps To Stay Focused When There’s So Much To Do

1. Write down fewer things to do.

We always OVEREXTEND our to do list. We put things we need to do now and things we need to do in 5 months, so we don’t forget them. It doesn’t matter how we organize that to do list and how we break it down…when we see the 150 items there – we get overwhelmed, don’t do any of them and instead do something entirely different.

Therefore we now keep the huge list with all the things that cross our mind and sound like a good idea, somewhere “hidden” and make smaller lists for each day.

Those lists we keep in front of us, somewhere at our desk. This way we can commit to the first task, then the second and then the third. We write about 5 things and try to finish them all.

2. Start with the most important one.

Our sister gave us the 7 habits of highly effective people and we're still on page 47 (we're a slow reader and not ashamed of that). Still, we know in that book there’s a matrix somewhere that tells us to do the important thing first.

We try to do this every single day, mostly during our morning routine. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But whenever we do, we don’t feel bad if we don’t finish all of our tasks for the day, because we've done the most important one.

3. Commit to finishing. (Huge)

Something we've struggled with a lot as a blogger was being consistent with our content. We would always write stuff and then leave them half-way done thinking we will come back to finish this soon.

We did this for 2 reasons: we wanted the article to be solid and then in our head we didn’t have the time to make it solid. So we'd just jot down our ideas and run. Future us will know better, she’s solid.

We never, ever returned to those articles. It felt like a punishment when we thought we needed to go back and try to finish them.

Things changed for the better when our goal became to actually start and finish an article in one sitting. Even if it’s just the draft. We'd give myself 30-40 minutes (max. 2 hours if it’s a science-heavy article) to write from start to finish. Our thought was way clearer and we were actually saying what we wanted to say, not just what we thought people wanted to hear.

We also found out, even if we give a million and one percent in our writing and invest more time, it won’t matter. We don’t like the articles we wrote in 3 days any better than the ones we finished in 30 minutes.

Committing to finishing in our opinion is key to staying focused.

4. WIFI Off

Even with all that commitment and matrix, whenever we have internet – we have distractions. We can work in a loud coffee shop, we can work when we have to pee, we can work when we're hungry, but the internet has proven to be the toughest distraction “out there”.

Our eyes are bleeding, but have we done much? Nope. Just “learned” some new things. This is especially true if you need to do research for one of your articles. There is SO MUCH INFORMATION OUT THERE! Even with science articles we get overwhelmed most of the time. It seems like with so much information, it somehow never is the right thing so we jump over to another one. It’s a complete mess.

So.

What we do now is: turn WIFI off, put our phone aside and don’t look at it. And then we're good.

We don’t check emails, we don’t check social media, we don’t check our stats every minute, we stop analyzing and comparing. We have no choice, but to actually work on what we have to work on right then and there. That’s when we write fast and get so much done.

It works even better in a coffee shop, because we can’t go and just fix myself a sandwich when we seek distraction. We can be working like this for at least an hour. Which is 10 times longer than our usual attention span.

5. Make it a part of your routine.

We hear more and more: keep your eye on the why. Well, making your why a part of your daily routine, something like a friendly reminder (not one that will put pressure on you) is what can make you more focused on the right things.

There are many shiny objects out there, and if you’re like us and love exploring – you’d go after each and every one of them. But when you know your WHY, you will be pulled by the thing that makes the most sense for you.

The one that’s in line with everything you believe, want and dream of. To us it’s a post-it on our computer that says why we want to do our best today is everything we need to stay focused that day.

We want you to know that we were just about to write this article the same way we write most of our articles: Outline it and forget about it.

Because we have to leave any minute, but we actually finished it in one sitting.

Staying focused is not that hard when you simply commit to getting it over with right then and there.

What do you do to stay focused? Any tips (as you can see, we NEED them!)