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HOW TO DO FOCUSED WORK IN A DISTRACTED
WORLD
www.workurious.com

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1. REDUCE EMAIL/GROUP CHAT TO A CERTAIN TIME IN THE MORNING
Mornings usually happen to be the best time for focused hard work because that’s when we’re fresh and haven’t
hit decision fatigue yet. Productivity experts have for years warned against beginning the day with email or
chatting.
Experiment with waiting until 10 am or even noon before checking your emails. Would anything bad happen if
you wait 4 hours longer to respond to a message? Reducing chatting to a specific time enables you to get more
done in the focused hours of the morning.
Check emails twice a day: one hour when you first enter the office and one hour before you leave the office, by
dedicating specific time slots for checking emails, you will discover you’re actually able to read more emails in
less time. And when you remove email checking from the core part of your work day, your time will be dedicated
to higher priority, uninterrupted, productive tasks.
Maura Thomas, who is a speaker, trainer, founder of RegainYourTime, and author of Personal Productivity
Secrets and Work Without Walls: An Executive’s Guide to Attention Management in the Age of Distraction says:
Shut off automatic download of messages and start fetching emails only when you’re ready
to deal with them.
Having this done on your phone too, will save your battery life.

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2. FOCUS ON ONE THING AT A TIME
Having more than one activity going on at the same time isn’t unusual; but at the moment when you’re doing
one particular task, focus and put all the other things aside.
When people get confused and overwhelmed, it’s because too many things are being focused on at once.
According to Tor Refsland when you multitask, two things happens:
• Your performance on several tasks will yield average quality, and
• Your brain becomes less effective when you try to focus on a single task.
If you have a lot to do, then by all means do them all, but only do them in sequence. When you go to the gym,
you probably have a whole routine you carry out, but when you’re on one machine, you’re not thinking about the
others; are you? You solely focus on the machine you’re on, and when you move on to the next machine, your
attention is given to that session and so on.
Work can be handled the same way and you’ll find out that you do each job and all of them together better.
Research has not only shown that multitasking doesn’t work, but that it’s also bad for your brain.

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3. WRITE-DOWN ONE OR TWO THINGS THAT YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED TO GET DONE AND SET REMINDERS
If you find yourself procrastinating on a project, it’s often because you don’t know the next course of action.
Take a breather and ask yourself:
What is it that I need to Find Out, Decide, or Do?
Keep the piece of paper on you all day. Refer to it and don’t carry out other activities until you can cross those
one or two things off of your list.
If you’re a business owner, make sure that at least one of them revolves around something that puts money in
your pocket (directly or indirectly). Usually the mental block is one or more of these three things asked.
• What information do I need to find and use?
• What decision(s) do I need to pluck out of the air and what are my choices?
• What do I need to get done so that the rest of the pieces fall into place and completes the puzzle?
Studies have shown that 90% of the time, having a list of tasks to carry out and asking these questions when
you hit a block will get you moving again.

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4. GET REWARDED
Remember when you were a kid and you got rewards for getting things done? The thrill of getting something at
the end of a task not only motivates you but drives you to achieve more.
In his Book, The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People, David Niven illustrated that rewards are responsible
for three-quarters of why we do things. Researchers find that the rewards that one believes are attainable, is a
significant factor in determining satisfaction and dedication towards work.
Perceived self-interest accounts for over 70 percent of personal ambition towards accomplishment. So,
whenever you complete a task on your to-do list treat yourself. (Yes, we know this is how dogs are trained but it
will work for you too.) If you think you’ll be having trouble in getting a reward stupendous enough to get you off
your couch, you should try a “commitment device”.
Have your friend hold $100. If you can complete a task by 5PM, you get your $100 back. If you don’t complete
it, you lose the $100 and your friend decides what to do with it. Your to-do list just became MUST-DO.

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5. LEARN HOW TO BALANCE STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED WORK
You as a creative person, will have a regular flow of new ideas and opportunity to try out these ideas in order to
achieve peak performance, but too much time spent tinkering with pet projects, and reading about new
concepts can lead to a miss dispensation of your time resources, and your core, i.e. “structured” work doesn’t
get done.
Companies like Google give their employees, freedom to use 20 percent of their paid hours as part of the time to
pursue special “unstructured” projects so as to encourage innovation. You need a structured approach to make
sure you don’t spend the 80 percent of your focused-work time, on the new and innovative pet projects.
If you use a shared calendar, you can control the nature and timing of unstructured campaign by blocking the
different elements of your work in time, which will then force people you share your calendar with to program
their activities around your top priorities. If you have someone else doing your scheduling for you, let him or her
understand that only a specific number of meetings or calls in a day or a week can be taken by you, so you don’t
end up with insufficient time to accomplish organized tasks.

7.
“
Remember, you can never get
everything done. Events and people
that could potentially cut off your
momentum abruptly may occur. You
can do focused work by having more
control over time spent on the
activities that brings you the biggest
results

8.
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