Focus! Getting distracted is worse than taking weed.
Could also be titled: How to be smarter than a goldfish.
Earlier this evening, I wanted to make a mobile transfer on my phone, and I kept getting distracted. I’d open my mobile banking app, swipe to WhatsApp to copy the account number, and bam! I get distracted by a status update, a reply to one of my stories and the rest is history.
I must have opened my bank app 5 times already.
Does this sound familiar?
You set out to do something on your phone or laptop, then realize that an hour has gone and you still haven’t achieved it? Yeah, there’s a reason we’re called the “distracted generation”.
Our generation has access to more information than any other in history. The internet seriously has democratized information, and with just a smartphone and a data subscription, you can access an almost unlimited amount of content. Books, movies, podcasts, you name it. Our minds have gotten used to consuming thousands of images, text, and videos that we often find it hard to focus on one thing per time.
And that’s extremely dangerous.
A 2005 research by the London Institute of Psychiatry shows that consistent distractions and interruptions to your workflow have a profound effect on your mental state, reducing your IQ by 10 points, which is twice the IQ reduction found in marijuana smokers.
Yes, by constantly flitting from one app to another, with our minds running like little hamsters on a wheel, we become dumber, as though we were stoners.
So, what’s the solution?
For me, it’s to close all unused apps. I’m the kinda guy that likes having a million apps open because I’m still working on all of them, but that’s what distracts me. So, once I open an app, I must stay there and finish what I came there to do, then close the app when I leave. It’s stressful, but it keeps me in check.
Another thing I do is to switch off my notifications. As one of my mentors Ajulu, always says, notifications are the alarms other people set for you. Currently, I have almost all notifications shut off, yet my smartwatch always finds one reason to vibrate, If it’s not a marketing SMS, it’s something from Snapchat or Twitter. So I switched everything off. The only notifications I get are from my immediate family, work, or the LOML. Every other person, including you, will have to wait.
You can’t come and make me dumber than a rat because of WhatsApp, abeg.
So, let me know, how do you manage distractions?
Leave a comment below, like this post, and share with that your friend that never finishes their work.
P.S My mentor, Ajulu, did a session on how to get more done by avoiding distractions, and I agreed to ghostwrite it to preserve the memories. Check out the document here: