Psychologies, the leading magazine for intelligent people, provides their inspirational yet rigorous approach to the perennial topic of focus, to include topics of mindfulness, clarity and productivity.
How are you today? We would hazard a guess that your answer will be along the lines of 'I'm so busy, ' 'I feel so frazzled, ' or 'what-am-I doing-even reading-this-book, I've got so much to do!'
However, we also suspect that you know in your heart of hearts, that life's not supposed to feel like this. You're not supposed to feel like you're in a hamster wheel that you can't get off; that life is a 'whirlwind' or 'one never-ending To Do list.' You know there has to be another way - but what is it? Well here it is: Real Focus.
Written in association with Psychologies Magazine the leading magazine for intelligent people, covering work, personal development and lifestyle issues Real Focus is:
Packed full of tips, techniques and advice to help you focus in on what matters
Based on scientific evidence and cutting edge global research
Rigorous with credible content presented in a light and accessible manner
Inspirational yet down to earth and practical
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So what is āReal Focusā anyway? Why do you need it and what would it bring to your life? In order to start answering these questions, we need to look at how your life probably feels right now ā in other words, what Real Focus definitely isnāt.
Chances are if you feel Real Focus is a problem for you, the following phrases feature heavily in your vocabulary:
āLifeās just crazy ā¦ā
āThere arenāt enough hours in the day ā¦ā
āIām feeling totally overwhelmed ā¦ā
āStop, I want to get off!ā
One of the key characteristics of lacking focus and feeling overwhelmed is that we canāt see the wood for the trees. This feels slightly different for everybody, but weād put money on the fact that the following are very familiar ā¦
1. Your time feels fragmented and ābittyā
Brigid Schulte, harassed mother of two and reporter for the Washington Post, remembers very clearly the point at which she decided she had to write her book Overwhelmed: How To Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time. She was clearing up after her sonās birthday party and her husband was outside on the patio smoking a cigar. Sheād cleared the food and plates away and all that was left to do now was to sweep the āHappy Birthdayā confetti off the table and floor. As an exhausted Schulte surveyed the small bits and pieces all over the place, it occurred to her that her life felt exactly like the confetti: scattered, fragmented and exhausting.
Sound familiar? When weāre trying to stretch ourselves too far, we lose sight of our goals and feel overwhelmed. This is how our time feels: like hundreds of little pieces of confetti ā that when you put them back together donāt seem to amount to much. You feel like youāve been on your feet all day, completing endless tasks: sending emails, running errands, and working your way through an ever-expanding to-do list ā but do you feel like youāve actually achieved anything?
Of course, youāre not alone in feeling like this. Our harried lives and constant busyness seem to have overtaken the weather as the UKās number one topic of conversation. We have more choice than ever in terms of what we do with our time, but this is stressing us out even more because we donāt know what to focus on. As a result, we fall into the trap of trying to focus on everything, splintering ourselves and our time into a million pieces of ātime confettiā.
This goes not just for work but for family and leisure time too. Itās probable that you feel like you donāt have enough down time and that itās difficult to get any unbroken periods of relaxation when your day is so fragmented. But the thing is, this down time is actually always in reach ā you just need to learn how to find it.
This book will not change ātimeā. There will always be 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. What it will help you with, however, is how you manage and therefore experience time, so that things feel more focused and you feel calmer and, ultimately, happier. Schulte calls it moving from ātime confettiā to ātime serenityā. Imagine ā¦
BRIGID SCHULTE ON THE PROBLEM WITH āTIME CONFETTIā
āWhen I saw that confetti whilst clearing up after my sonās birthday party, I knew thatās exactly how life can feel: all these little bits and scraps of time that donāt amount to much of anything.
Psychologists who have studied time and how we spend it, have found that we are happiest when we are in flow ā that is, focusing on something for an uninterrupted period of time and being engrossed in it. However, our time is so fragmented these days, and weāre so busy, itās often hard to find that stretch of time in the first place. And even if we could, we struggle to give ourselves permission to really sink into flow. We get distracted by our To Do list, weāre worried about being āproductive.ā And without taking time to think about whatās most important, we often donāt really know what to focus on, or where to start. It takes practice, especially practice in giving ourselves permission to experience flow.
But research is showing very clearly that we canāt multi-task like this and expect to do everything well. Instead of multi-tasking, weāre really task-switching, which wears out the brain and degrades focus and attention, so you end up not doing anything particularly well. And in the end, that just makes us feel worse.ā
