Trying to Focus in a world of Distractions

Hello everyone!

As some of you have probably surmised, I’ve been having a hard time staying focused and making progress on several of my projects. It’s a strange mix of brainfog, exhaustion and the plethora of distractions that feel more gratifying or easier to do than working on passion projects. For the longest time I thought I could just power through it and make consistent progress. The problem, however, was that this wasn’t the case for several months now. For the past weeks, I’ve tried a few different things I’ve found have worked.

One thing I found that helped a lot was being able to check something off on a daily basis when I worked on any of the projects. My friend introduced the concept to me of “journal trackers” and I found it super helpful. Essentially it was a simple concept of filling in a box for everyday I had done a specific task. There was a nice sense of satisfaction I got everytime I filled in a box that kept making me want to keep going and fill in more. Originally I did this in a physical journal but I found the act of redrawing the graph every month a bit too arduous to keep up consistently. I recently downloaded a habit tracker app called “Loop Habit Tracker” and using that as a tracking system with pretty good results so far. I will say this works for me specifically because my phone doesn’t distract me as much as my computer does. If the phone was distracting, I would stick with the physical journal.

I’ve been finding that this year has really made me aware of how distracting my computer set up actually is. What I find specifically distracting is YouTube and Twitter. Going through High School and University, I was always a multitask kind of person. It felt incredibly inefficient to only be doing one thing at a time and eventually it got to a point where I would always have a YouTube video playing in the background as I worked. The problem with this, however, was that as I got older I lost the ability to efficiently multitask and having a YouTube video in the background was more distracting than it was helpful as I would pay more attention to that than work as it required significantly less effort. It’s become too much of a problem to ignore.

Twitter also became a problem as a lot of artists I follow and admire post their art mostly on Twitter. I love browsing art, it’s something I do every day as it helps inspire me to be a better artist. The problem, however, was that I would end up doomscrolling for far longer than I anticipated and waste so much of my day doing so. Interestingly I notice this only happens with Twitter as I mostly stay off social media except for my art accounts so I don’t browse Facebook or Instagram at all. But Twitter is still too much of a time sink that it becomes a major problem now that I have so many projects to work on.

Another concept my friend told me about was the Pomodoro Technique to help be more productive and focused. It’s a time management concept where you work for a certain amount of time and break it up with short breaks as a breather. I tried this originally with middling results as admittedly my own willpower has crumbled over the year. It’s hard for me to resist the social media doomscroll. Interestingly there are ways people have gamified the Pomodoro Technique that help add an additional incentive. Right now I’m trying a phone app called “Forest” where you set the timer and if you work until the timer finishes, you plant more trees in your forest. While this did help, I also found that I needed to add additional aspects to it to help me resist. I would use bluetooth earphones to listen to music from my phone while the timer is going and have my phone out of reach. I’ve been doing this for the past week and I’ve found it’s been incredibly helpful in getting me to focus as I only have the music to work with. Twitter is still a problem though not as much as YouTube so it’s been a good step in the right direction.

The world as it is has been constructed in a way to keep us constantly distracted by social media and stop us from accomplishing our own goals. In moderation, social media is wonderful as being connected to so many other people sharing the same goals and interests can be very inspiring, but the distracting nature of it is profitable to these companies as it steals our time away from the goals and passions we have in life. It’s something I’ve slowly learned to become more wary of if I want to accomplish my life’s goals.

Hope this helps!

– Raphael