How to Maintain Focus in Uncertain Times

The world is an increasingly confusing, noisy place. I myself am guilty of letting it crowd in and hamper my productivity and in turn my well being. When I begin to feel unmotivated, I recommend taking a leaf out of ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’. In this now-classic leadership bible, author Stephen R. Covey discusses the Circles of Concern and Influence which affect our daily habits.

Our Circles of Concern and Influence

Finding balance

Our Circle of Concern encompasses things that we care about, and even maybe things that affect us, but which we have little or no control over. Our Circle of Influence includes things that we can control and do have influence over.

When we are reactive, we waste time and energy worrying about issues from our Circle of Concern that we cannot change. When this happens, our Circle of Influence shrinks. It’s far better to be proactive and exert effort on things that we can control. When we do this, our Circle of Influence grows.

So it goes without saying that we will achieve more and feel happier if we stop focusing on issues that fall within our Circle of Concern and focus back on the Circle of Influence.

However, the problem is that our frontal lobe is overloaded with constant scanning and switching focus, whether that be on COVID-19, the war, the economy and everything else. 

While it’s important to stay up to date with current affairs, it’s best to just skim it instead of spending all day reading the news. The 24/7 news cycle has conditioned us to be alert: it is designed to grab your attention and hold it by making you angry or scared and frightened of what is happening that you have no control over. 

All this can leave us feeling exhausted and unable to focus!

How to carve out time to focus

We need periods of focus to make the best use of our frontal lobe’s executive function. That's why productivity techniques such as time blocking, the Pomodoro Technique (25-minute work sprints) and Eisenhower Matrix work so well.

Switch off distractions

It’s important to switch off all notifications on our phones and computers so that we are not ‘multi-tasking’ or as its better-known task switching. Even just recognising an alert and deciding not to act upon it is a switch.

Focus on one thing at a time

After you have turned off all the notifications you’ll be free to focus on what is in front of you now. Set aside blocks of time to do some emails, then your Teams, then your social media and so on. All you need are short bursts of working exclusively on one thing at a time.

For example, view emails as a single task and get them done fast by using the Eisenhower Matrix to sort them into ‘do now’, ‘do later’, ‘throw out/ignore’ or ‘pass on to someone else’. Then employ a Pomodoro work sprint to blast through them!

You can then do exactly the same thing for all the other channels such as team and social media. Be strict by getting rid of the stuff that doesn’t matter (no matter how interesting that click-bait title is). 

Filter out distractions

I also find it helpful to set up some filters to sift through emails - I use rules to file them into different categories that I can come back to later (and if I don’t, then they were never that important in the first place). When I ignore unimportant things, they mostly go away - people are really good at using someone else's brain to solve their problems!

Of course, if you’re guilty of this (as we all are from time to time), allow yourself a short burst of five or ten minutes to see if you can’t solve it yourself first before asking for help.

You may be surprised to find that you can more often than not.

Let’s wrap this up

In short, invest a small amount of time figuring out what’s within your control and leave the rest to sort itself out!