Find out what works best for you, forget multitasking, make sure you take enough breaks and, oh, don’t feed cornflakes to your horse.
Our modern workplaces are rife with distractions – telephones, emails, social media, text messages and workplace colleagues can all disturb focus.
What follows is irritability and a feeling that we are not being productive – a recipe for rising stress levels.
Liverpool-based Terry McCoy, founder of the NLPWorks, is an expert in NLP and mindfulness. He offers the following five invaluable nuggets of advice for making your day go more smoothly.
1. Get to know yourself and find out what works for you. Look on the internet and you will find countless tips on how to improve your focus and concentration. Most of them work, for some people, some of the time. For example, I’m not a great fan of writing reports and I’ve found that I can concentrate for longer periods if I find a nice coffee shop, settle down at a table and crack on.
I find that the activity around me helps me concentrate. Now that may not everyone else’s cup of herbal infusion but it works for me so get to know your tendencies.
2. Do the things that require the most concentration first. Generally we find it easier to concentrate in the mornings when we are rested and as the day progresses we can find it harder to concentrate. So do the things that require the most concentration first.
3. Forget multitasking. This little ‘nugget’ is guaranteed to garner snorts of derision from business people I meet. From a neurological perspective we can’t multitask. What we’re actually doing is shifting our attention from one task to another so quickly that we think we are multitasking.
When we do one thing at a time research has shown time and again that we are more productive. Each time I shift my attention from say, writing a report to attending to that email the has just pinged to let me know it has landed in my inbox, my brain goes through five separate steps – very tiring.
And as if that wasn’t enough, every time I shift my attention from one thing to another it gets harder for me re-engage with my original task.
4. Take a break. In my work as a coach and therapist I often meet people who tell me how busy they are, how they’ll eat lunch ‘on the go’ – and that is if they have time to eat and the stress… It’s like a badge of honour.
If you owned a race horse and you relied on that horse to provide you with an income, would you run it in race after race on the same day? Would you feed it cornflakes? If you remembered to that is.
You’re that race horse. Ideally take a short break every hour. Go for a walk, do something totally unrelated to whatever work you are doing at the time. See how your productivity improves.
5. Practice mindfulness. Mindfulness can be defined as the practice of paying attention to your present moment experience without judgement.
This is ‘concentration gold’. The physical and mental health benefits of practicing mindfulness are well documented and clinically proven. Mindfulness is gaining in popularity in the corporate world as one of the most effective antidotes to stress and anxiety which are the sworn enemy of focus and concentration. No robes or sandals required.
Organisations such as Google regularly hold mindfulness workshops for their staff because they can see the positive effect it has on their workforce. Ease yourself into the habit (no pun intended) by downloading Headspace, a free mindfulness app and give yourself 10 minutes of peace in among the chaos. Have a mindful cup of tea or coffee, open your five senses and pay attention to the act of making and enjoying the drink.
If you’re interested in the science bit every time you perform an act mindfully you are strengthening the neural circuitry that supports concentration and focus.