The Focus Formula
Focus is a skill that drives success, productivity, and the ability to generate new ideas and possibilities. When you’re truly focused, you’re at the top of your game. Great musicians, doctors, actors, lawyers, and athletes know this. Without focus, their performances become flawed and mistakes are made, often serious mistakes.
How do you develop focus?
I recently read a piece by Robert Middleton who studied this for several years and his conclusion is that focus is the product of practicing several positive habits on a regular basis. Practicing just a few won’t cut it, nor will sheer talent and persistence. How many brilliant, hardworking people do you know who have gotten burned out?. Here’s what he calls The Focus Formula:
The Focus Formula
There are four basic steps to the Focus Formula:
- More sleep, regular sleep schedule
- Better nutrition, vitamins, and water
- More exercise, less sitting
- Getting organized, clearing clutter
Get Enough Sleep – The recommended amount for most adults is eight hours. Some can get away with a little less and some need a little more. But if you don’t get enough sleep, you start the day with a sleep deficit, and as a consequence, decreased focus.
Eat Whole, Not Processed, Foods – This seems to be common sense, but sometimes it feels impossible to eat healthy foods on a regular basis. A good place to start is not with what you do eat but what you eliminate from your diet. Food writer Michael Pollan advises: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
Drink More Water – More water flushes toxins out of your system; it hydrates all your cells; and yes, when you’re drinking more water, you also feel better overall and more focused. There’s considerable controversy about how much water you should drink. The oft-repeated “eight glasses a day” doesn’t really have much scientific support. So to start, I’d simply recommend “more than you’re drinking now” for most people. Give it a shot and see whether you feel more focused or not.
Exercise 30+ Minutes Every Day –
You can do stretching, Pilates, and yoga. You might try weightlifting, stretch bands, pushups, and situps. Or you can run—anywhere from a few miles to ultramarathons. It’s not as important what you do so much as what you can stick with for a lifetime. And that means moderate, consistent exercise. It will take some trial and error to find your best exercise and routine.
The one exercise, however, that virtually everyone recommends is walking. A half hour a day can have tremendous impact on your overall health. It’s safe, helps you lose weight, maintains flexibility, and can be done in a gym or on your neighborhood streets.
Sit Less, Stand More – Most of us are sitting in front of our computers all day and our TVs all evening. According to Dr. James Levine, sitting and a sedentary lifestyle are killing us. He coined the phrase, “sitting is the new smoking.”
The Huffington Post reported:
Dr. James Levine is the director of the Mayo Clinic/Arizona State University Obesity Solutions Initiative and inventor of the treadmill desk. Levine has been studying the adverse effects of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles for years and has summed up his findings in two sentences: “Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV, and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death.”
Researchers say since sitting reduces circulation and makes it harder for “feel-good hormones” to make their way to receptors. And if you’re not feeling good, you’re not focused.
One solution is to stand at our desks. I stand at my desk and it works; I’m standing at it right now!
Get Organized – I’m not sure if being disorganized leads to a lack of focus or if lack of focus leads to poor organization. It’s probably some of both.
But you know what it’s like to walk into your office when things are a mess. Papers are everywhere, it’s hard to find anything, your to-do list is in shambles, and you are not sure what you need to do today to move your business forward. How do you feel?
When you are organized, the experience is completely different, isn’t it? Your desk is clean and papers are filed where you can find them.
And that feels amazing. With disorganization, clutter, and lack of direction, it’s very hard to maintain focus for long. And then, when you add a number of other things from the list above, your lack of focus becomes dangerously low. Things slip through the cracks, your energy is down, and your motivation plummets.
Where Do You Start? – “Overwhelm” goes hand in hand with lack of focus. You have so much to do, but your energy is suboptimal because of lack of sleep, poor nutrition, little exercise, and too much sitting. When this is the case, it can be hard to get organized and on track.
And here I am, throwing something else at you, telling you that you need to change your lifestyle habits! Yes, but you do it with small steps, one thing at a time. Don’t try to be perfect, just slowly work on increasing focus-building activities in each of the four areas.
Make just a little progress every day and you’re going to experience more focus within a week or two. Once you get a taste of how that improves everything else, you’ll want to keep the ball rolling. Just stay with it, changing little by little.
