How not to be distracted in 2018!

At work, everyone gets distracted at some point. There might be a new movie trailer that's out, a new gadget review or even a cute puppy gif. We can take a few minutes to look at these, but it's always important to get back to work and focus - this will help you stay on the focus track.

Well, that is one interesting topic to write about.

Everyone has a set of apps that they waste their time on. No denying, we all need our breaks and as individuals we have our own style of wasting time.

Before going deeper, there is a point where taking break becomes wasting time. Studies shows that a person can think clearer outside the office or in the early morning or late night, all of which is outside the office hours. This leads to an average of 2 hours of attentive working per day.

The drop in concentration levels is blamed on mobile phones (one more point for our moms to complain about smart phones!). To be honest it seems true enough, because, before the birth of smart phones we had at least a dozen telephone numbers memorized and we could recognize pincodes and telephone codes by just looking at the number. We feel like its a waste of time with Google just a touch away from our fingers.

With all that said, there is no point in trying to reduce the use of smart phones, unless you are Ed Sheehan and can take an off into the forest for days. We all want to be Ed, but unfortunately all of us don’t have a good voice and not all can pull of ‘Perfect’. But, taking a vacation does help in increasing your concentration. Here are a list of things that will help in boosting your concentration,

• Taking a vacation, every now and then
• Meditation
• Reading a book
• Pomodoro technique
• Distraction

Taking a vacation doesn’t work all the time cause we run out of cash in just a week or, at the maximum, in two. (I wonder where all my money goes… ‘Oh look, a sale!!!!’). Vacationing comes in handy once in every quarter.

Meditation/Yoga

Most of us find meditation a difficult task or fall asleep in the process of it. But for those who get the hang of meditating or yoga, there is no better way to keep yourself calm and pump up the concentration level.

Reading a book

Finding time to have a good meal is difficult, amongst that reading a book? Sometimes we will have to go with it for the better and this is one of it. Books take you into a different world and will help in relieving the stress you develop from reality.

The above three are some measures you can take outside the office. Ofcourse if you can meditate inside your office, then I will be meditating half my work hour 😋

Pomodoro technique

This seems to work for a few of us but in the process of working we tend to ignore the alarm or at times miss it. This is for the beginners, once you get used to it, your brain automatically trains you to take breaks then and now. Our designers make use of it a lot and they work fine. Infact they are productive than any of us even on boring days but that might also be because they think too much and don’t know how to keep things simple. For them its all about details even if there is just one element.

Powering up with hobbies:

Distracting oneself with a hobby is the easiest and readily available solution and we turn to our smart phones for that.

→ Scrolling through the news feed of any social media app like Facebook or Instagram or Reddit is not the issue. But the amount of time you spend on it is. Given all of us go for the easy available distraction we need to tune on how we spend the distraction time.

→ For one, a marketing person will make use of how much time he/she spends on social media but how can others make use of it? Here are some ways,

• Fill your news feed with as much professional stuff as you can. I know it will be boring in the beginning, but once you get used to reading tech articles you will be interested in knowing the updates over the same.
• If you find anything interesting have a group where you can pitch in those posts/articles/campaign ideas to your entire team, where the marketing person can work over the ideas that will work for that particular organization.
• Allow one to post in personal accounts and share that post in your organization’s page. This will make the user conscious of their activities and would want to have a professional image.

→ The other way that can help is to use applications that are more business oriented but fun to use. Scrolling through unsplash.com then and now to set a wallpaper or to suggest an image from it to be used by your colleague can help you calm down.

All of this is limited to how much time you spend in scrolling. Anything beyond a span of 10 minutes is addiction and anything beyond that 10 minutes occurring more than once in every 2-3 hour is even worse.

→ One more of the hobbies that can help is to have a short play session. This can be done as a group activity as well making it all the more effective.

→ Games that involve a ball is appreciated (forbidden in our office) as long as you don’t break one of the systems or any breakable for that matter. If you want to know, we don’t play cricket anymore. Want to know why? Contact, [email protected]. :)

And over all, the all time solution is to plug in and listen to songs. Have some playlists that will come handy when you want to work focused. We have some amazing playlists, and we will be sharing some with everyone. To know follow our social accounts. :)

Disclaimer

This is an article written from personal experience and some references. I don’t want to end up answering your bosses for asking you to use social media or play games. There is also the time of how and when you do it, mind it!

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