Managing Your Focus While Working Online
Today, more people than ever before are consistently working online in one capacity or another.
For some, working online takes the form of entrepreneurship, and involves running something like an e-commerce business.
For others, working online will mean working remotely for a more established company – and as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people have found themselves in this category.
The Internet offers many great benefits for businesses and professionals of all types, ranging from the ability to easily find flyer templates to enhanced marketing and networking opportunities.
Ultimately, though, working online can present some real issues for our ability to focus.
Here are a few tips and suggestions for managing your focus while working online.
Use time tracking tools with reminder features
With a growing awareness of the need for deep focus, as well as effective time management, many different companies and individuals have been creating apps and tools focused on time tracking.
While tracking your time in and of itself may help you to be more focused over the course of your day-to-day professional life, time tracking tools that issue regular reminders to track the work you are doing, or to pay attention to your current tasks, can work wonders when it comes to gently nudging you towards greater intentionality during the day.
Who hasn’t been in a situation where they became slightly distracted, then looked up, and found half an hour had passed?
One issue with the Internet is that so easy to fall down a rabbit hole without even necessarily noticing it. Time tracking tools with built-in reminders can be very helpful at combating this tendency.
Consider utilizing website blockers
Distracting websites are an ever-present threat to our attention whenever we may be working online – and for individuals who work from home, alone, there is certainly a heightened risk of losing focus and spending major chunks of the day absorbed in these kinds of distracting activities.
Website blockers may be one way of reducing the threat to your attention presented by specific sites – whether those are social media platforms, news sites, or any number of other things.
Sometimes, simply having your computer refusing to allow you on to certain sites may be an appropriate step to take.
Train yourself to focus on one task at a time
Multitasking is well known to lead to reduced performance and increased stress – and, in fact, no one is really able to do several different tasks at once. Instead, multitasking really means switching between tasks rapidly without giving any individual task your full focus.
Focusing on one task at a time leads to deeper engagement and an increased capacity for deep focus – and it’s likely that the more you train yourself to do this, the better at it you become.
In order to better shield yourself against the potential distractions presented by the web that large, it might be a very good idea to take steps to train yourself to focus on one thing at a time in general.
This may mean reading more books, or doing certain mindfulness promoting exercises like meditation.
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