The Wildbit team focused on focus for the month of June. We went through the exercise of being super mindful of our time with the goal of getting in 4 very focused hours of work each day.
Before we started, I spent some time tweaking RescueTime so that it would automatically show my overall productivity and how much focus time I was getting. As part of that process, I subscribed to their email newsletter and quite enjoyed some of the articles they referred to. This was one of them.
In this piece, they outline the difference between internal and external distractions. The ones listed in the title above are the external, but it’s the internal issues that are hardest to overcome.
It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds.
This was good to read while I was going through the exercise of dumbing down my phone (more on that below). And while that exercise is focused on the removal of external input (email, social media, Slack etc), it’s actually just making it harder to act on the inner impulse (I’m bored or unsure of how to move forward on the problem at hand).
