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Nowadays it’s incredibly hard to stay focused. Your pocket vibrates at any given moment because you’re getting ten new emails and on social media there’s all these new notifications and the phone is ringing and your kids need help and your colleagues are coming up because you are working in an open office plan and they’re asking you to chime in on some memo. Maintaining focus nowadays is harder than ever before. But in some ways, it’s way more critical too.
One of the things that we know about the most productive people and the most productive companies is that they create ways to enhance their focus. They manage their mind in such a way that they’re able to focus on what’s important and ignore distractions much better. And the way that they do this is by what’s known as building mental models. Essentially telling themselves stories about what they expect to see, engaging in this kind of inner dialogue about what they think should be happening that allows their brain almost subconsciously to figure out what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Think for a minute about what it’s like when you walk into a meeting and your boss asks you an unexpected question. Our instinct in a moment like that is to react immediately. And we think to ourselves afterward, “God, I could have put that so much more eloquently.” Why are some people so much better at maintaining their focus and not reacting and not getting distracted by all these things? It’s because ahead of time they’ve envisioned what they expect to see. They’ve envisioned what they expect to occur. So on the subway when they’re riding to work they think about what is this day going to be like. I know that I’m going to this meeting. What do I expect to occur at that meeting? And so when they walk in and their boss asks them some unexpected question, their brain almost subconsciously says, “I didn’t expect that question to occur. This isn’t matching the picture in my brain of what I anticipated. So I need to put that question off. I need to say can we take that offline and I’ll answer that later.”
I use this all the time. It used to be when I would ride the subway into work I would spend that time reading the paper or I would try to get caught up on memos or something else. What I do now is I put everything away and I spend that 30 minutes just trying to envision what is this day going to be like. Because I know that the more that I have thought through what’s about to occur, the more that I have a strong vision in my mind of what I should expect and anticipate, the more my subconscious is going to be able to decide, “This is what you should focus on. This is what you can safely ignore.” I’m trying to train my brain by just doing a couple of minutes of thinking through what’s about to occur to make better decisions about where my focus should actually go.