Best tips for staying focused?

I believe we are really only very productive or focused for a few hours each day. The rest of the time is just being on autopilot and of course, you need some downtime to avoid burning out.

What works for me is blocking out time period to work on stuff that are important to me.

Say 5-8am are the most important and productive time to work on my product. I can deal with emails and replies later in the afternoon when I tend to get tired (after lunch).

I also use the Pomodoro method when working from 5-8am.

There's a lot of helpful suggestions on this thread: blocking out time for deep work, structuring your day, meditation, etc.

I want to add one thing that worked for me: looking at things from a macro POV (and building a feedback loop around it).

I realized I couldn't pre-plan every minute of my day like many others. My motivation and focus would vary quite a lot. Instead of planning out each day, I would set my priorities for each week.

At the start of each week, I take 15 minutes and ask myself:

• What are the top three things I want to accomplish this week?
• What steps do I need to take to accomplish each of them?
• What are the challenges or blockers that stand in my way?

This gives me a clear roadmap of what I need to achieve, how I need to achieve it and, what my blockers are.

It also helps me be more flexible in planning my days. I can set my to-do's with the full picture in mind.

At the end of the week, I ask myself:

• Compared to the priorities I set on Monday, how did I do?
• What did I do well? What made me happy?
• What didn't go as planned? Where can I improve?

It's a good system that helps you iterate upon your approach each week and improve. I would recommend you try it out!

Funny thing is, I got this idea when one of the first teams who signed up for MyCheckins did a Weekly Planning and Weekly Retro team check-in. I put a personal spin to it and have been doing it for 6 weeks now.

When your mind and brain have no further energy to give you - use your body. Movement creates movement.

Even if it doesn’t make you more focused it will definitely make you feel body - it’s chemical and a great hack to make you feel better

I’ve been following the podcast of Dr. Huberman on that and really like his content and style. This specific episode was very helpful for me during the pandemic. Hope it helps you too!

https://hubermanlab.com/how-to-increase-motivation-and-drive/

Motivation is nothing. Is just an emotion. It comes and goes.
What you need is DISCIPLINE

Just make a commitment and execute it every day.
With no excuses and no exceptions.

And remember - you don't need to be productive all the time.
All you need is to follow your commitment every single day and the results will come.

Good luck!

Huge! Thanks so much everyone for sharing. These are really helpful!

Lots of great thoughts here. Thanks to anyone sharing.

Does anyone else ever feel, "Self-Help Fatigue?" A lot of these suggestions ARE helpful, but I've read them before and a lot are basically, "Be disciplined by having the discipline to plan, meditate, exercise, etc." I want more. I don't think it cuts to the root of the problem and the problem is our whole outlook, our beliefs.

"We can only be very productive or focused for few hours each day." This is 100% myth. Someone that believes this has never made a clear plan and taken ADD medication under a deadline. I wrote my first novel 8+ hours a day with time-blocking, hypnosis, and pomodoro breaks with randomized rituals on flashcards to kick in my dopamine. We all know we have the CAPACITY to work and focus 16 hours a day, but we don't.

We don't want to work that much. Our time is ticking. Once we're adults we'll be lucky if we get 43,000,000 minutes to enjoy ourselves and what that means is unique to each of us. We want to fill that time with as much pleasure and fun as possible.

YET, we do have survival needs, which means we need to make a lot of money, become useful, thrive physically and mentally or life will be more suffering and we'll die early. I think WORK in some form is the opportunity for sustainable happiness, joy, and pleasure. We can only quit our jobs and play casual video games on the beach for so long before we're just uncomfortable and sick. ...But work, in all its various forms, which means producing something in exchange for wealth (money, health, intimacy, love, leaving a legacy, etc.) is something we really could do all day, everyday, non-stop, no downtime. Surviving and then thriving is what we're called to do.

If you're having trouble focusing, I think you still have this belief, this voice in the back of your head somewhere that maybe you REALLY want to be doing something else like eating a cupcake while watching Hulu. If you know--truly KNOW that voice is lying to you and that there is something just as good or even better in your WORK, you'll FOCUS. If your mind ever strays, you'll notice quickly and bring it back.

I've heard many people react with confusion when I say, "MMMMMmmmmmm... Fun." about an especially tedious or challenging work task. They can hear the pleasure in my tone. At first, they assume I'm being sarcastic. Maybe I'm just trying to convince myself, but wouldn't it be worth it? I HAVE convinced myself, because I do my job at least 40 hours a week, half of my time each week, and I'm not supposed to find the pleasure in it?!! For some things, you first convince yourself, and the pleasure comes.

That 3-4 hours thing is just you negotiating with yourself: "Look, I'll just do this 3-4 hours then we can do something more fun, okay?"

I'm not criticizing, because you're the one who has to decide what you want for your life. I'm just giving you the choice. You can find a way to go all in on your work, and think "We're going to find what's REALLY fun here." I just hope to convince you that there's an alternative reality where someone says, "Work," and you start to salivate. "Mmmmmmm... Marriage takes WORK. Parenting takes WORK. Work takes WORK. Oh, yeah. Bring it on. Where's the work? When can we start? Can I start now?"

Lots of good suggestions already, especially around planning, habits, and using movement. I'll add a few for managing your psychology, which is always the hardest part for me:

1. Forgive yourself. Focus is hard. You're not always going to be motivated or productive. Feeling bad about unmotivated will only make the problem worse. I've never been able to berate myself into being motivated :)

2. Get curious about what need you have that's not being met. I'm a fan of self-determination theory, which holds that humans have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Introspecting on these can often get me unstuck.

Maybe the task is too hard and I need to start smaller or from an angle that suits my strengths better (competence).

Maybe I'm feeling isolated and working with a friend (even just over zoom) or turning an email into a phone call, etc would help (relatedness).

Maybe I'm doing something because I feel I have to but it's something I could reframe to turn into something I want to do because it aligns with my values (autonomy). For example, sometimes I reply to emails because I feel I have to or I'm not meeting a social expectation. That's always a slog. Other times, I remember that I really like helping people and replying is a way to do that. Then it's fun. Same task but different framing.

3. Do a reset activity. Give yourself a fresh start. Exercise and talking to a friend are the two that work best for me.

For me it’s simple. Staying focused comes down to remove distractions, eat healthy, and workout regularly.
Keeping motivated is a different story. If you are not motivated about what you are doing, you are probably doing the wrong thing. But on the other side there are always times we’re you have to overcome a motivational crisis - maybe with the help of a friend or a community :)

Make yourself responsible for your time.
Are you happy if you lose focus and drift off? Of course not.

To you, it may be valuable if I share my story:

• I tracked my time honestly. If I was distracted, I track "Social media" or whatever I got lost into.
• At the end it gave me an overview where I could see all the time I invested, but also the time I wasted.
• I was trying to work a minimum of 40 hours a week, but I was barely working 30.
• I thought I put much effort into it, but the actual numbers of productivity told me otherwise.
• I used https://segro.app to help me achieve this self-awareness, but feel free to track your time the way you want it. (note: I created Segro myself so I'm biased)

And at the end, the best feeling is that if you reach your goal (for me it is 40 hrs/week of real productivity), you will become more satisfied and you are more likely to enjoy your free time because you will feel pleased with your actions.

Rika wrote about this in her newsletter. She's using a combination of journaling (to figure out the why) and project tracking (to figure out the what). I'm not a fan of todo lists, but I found her system useful. It gives me space to change.
https://www.newsletter.rikagoldberg.com/p/jarc-a-framework-to-make-sense-of

I agree on blocking time to focus!
Also, take a leaf from the Atomic Habits book (highly recommend!) and have a 'daily highlight' - one thing you absolutely must get done that day. It doesn't have to be work related, but one thing you're excited to achieve, and block out a specific time to get it done. I find this hugely helpful!
Pomodoro is amazing, there are a bunch of YouTube videos you can have on which I find help trick my brain into thinking I'm working with other people in the room who are also quiet and focused. (I personally use 50mins focus, 10 min break or 50/10)
Motivation will come and go honestly, the trick is to build daily habits which allow you to work through certain things when motivation is lacking, and having tactics that mean you CAN take a break when your brain just isn't in the mood.
Hope that helps!

Meditation helps in staying focused. Several tests carried out on individuals have clearly proved that just a few minutes of meditation every day increases concentration levels.

https://sps.columbia.edu/news/how-meditation-can-help-you-focus

Re motivation my personal experience is that sustaining motivation for an extended period of time (days, weeks, months) rarely works. What works however is if you form a habit. For instance if an individual need to write "x" lines of code every day, make that a habit. Write a few lines of code every single day. That's how you achieve your goal, motivation or no motivation.

What helps me the most is definitively to plan my day with blocks for tasks beginning and stopping at a specific time. It creates a feeling of sligth urgency. And somehow a sens of order at the same time that I like, like I'm on track.
Sometimes I dont get really into my task at hand, but my minimal goal is just to show up and be there. After a few days I tend to forgot that I wasn't productive, but I do remember that I showed up, so I feel the urge to keep the chain going.
After that it is just a matter of time, before stuff progress. It can be slow at times, but I found that highly sustainable.

I normally make a todo list at night for the next day, and in the day I just make sure I take breaks like 15 mins here and there.

Hi @Joumana, having endured Melbourne lockdowns I feel your pain! You might get something from my friend Jiro Taylor's podcast. He's kind of the guru on flow state and has built his empire around helping people spend more time in it. https://insighttimer.com/jiro333