Five Ways to Improve Your Focus

Do you have too much on your plate and it’s distracting? When at work, are you thinking of your chores, and when at home – about your professional projects? Your racing thoughts are making it really difficult for you, but you feel your greatest enemy is your lack of focus. Read on and learn how to get rid of such problems.

– We both live and work quickly. While working on one task, we are already thinking about the next one. Quite often we wonder what we are going to do in the evening, or over the weekend, when we are still at work. In addition, there are constant social media notifications, distracting us as well. All the above hardly help us stay focused – says Marta Kamińska from Solutions.Rent.

See more: Five Soft Skills Worth Developing

First: get some sleep

A new project with a deadline for yesterday, or perhaps a gripping series on Netflix? No matter your reason, what’s important is that you’re not sleeping enough another night in a row. When you’re sleep deprived you become easily distracted and it gets really hard to focus. That’s why you should:

– go to bed and get up at roughly the same times,
– sleep at least seven hours a day,
– an hour before going to bed make sure to turn off any devices that emit blue light (TV, cell phone, laptop),
– avoid heavy meals before going to bed.

Second: take care of your diet

A bad diet and not enough water during the day make you have less energy, and make you sleepy and less perceptive. If you can’t remember about drinking water, fitness planners can help you, or you can install an app to remind you about it. Be sure to include the following into your diet:

– fatty sea fish (salmon, mackerel) which are rich with omega-3 fatty acids to support brain function,
– dark fruits (blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries), as they contain flavonoids to improve your memory,
– walnuts, which are rich with healthy fats, protein and omega-3 acids that are beneficial to the brain function,
– green leaf vegetables (spinach, kale, cabbage), which contain folic acid and beta-carotene that slow down your cognitive function deterioration,
– cold pressed oils (olive oil, linen oil, nigella oil), which contain omega-3 acids.

Third: make your brain work out

In your free time, apart from your regular physical activity – preferably outside – exercise your brain too. How? Solve jigsaw puzzles, sudoku or crossword puzzles, or play chess. These simple, yet pleasurable activities will help you keep your brain in shape.

Did you know…

Fresh air is your friend when it comes to improving your focus. Make sure that you go for a 30-minute walk outside everyday. This will provide more oxygen to your brain, so that it will work more efficiently through the day.

See also: Eight Steps towards Better Time Management

Fourth: mono-tasking

Stanford University researchers proved that people who work on multiple tasks at the same time take longer to finish all of them, and the quality of their work suffers.

By focusing on one task at a time, you’ll finish faster and more efficiently. That’s why you should try to work on just one project at any given moment. Turn the notifications off, don’t check your social media, don’t think about your chores at home.

Fifth: planning

Work in a task-oriented manner. Setting forth your priorities and preparing the plan for the day will help you focus on the tasks at hand. After every set of tasks, take a break. You surely know all these rules from the Pomodoro technique. Try to adjust it to yourself and set your own breaks and working time.

You can also try dividing your workload into deep work and shallow work. The former requires a lot of focus – do it when you are at your maximum capacity. The latter requires just some attention, for example social media communication or e-mail replies.

Enough sleep, healthy diet, limiting the time you spend online, brain exercises and good planning may effectively improve the quality of your work and your quality of life as well. Will you try?

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