DEV Community: Nathan J. Luis

22 Simple Ways to Learn Faster

Nathan J. Luis — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 15:47:49 +0000

I know how it feels.

You want to get your current project done, but you perhaps lack a few skills, and you feel like it’d be such a drag and take months or years to learn them to an appropriate level. It feels more and more like an insurmountable obstacle, the longer you think about it.

Or maybe, you are very ambitious, and you want to accomplish so much in your life, that you can’t be wasting 10.000 hours just to gain a few skills. Or perhaps, you don’t have these hours left for you…

You have to apply these skills in practice. Yesterday.

Perhaps, you don’t want to spend all your free time learning, and you’d like to spend more time with your family, on your hobby, or to walk your dog.

It’s frustrating to think how much time investment this new skill or this new knowledge domain would require you to put in before you can get some returns on this investment of time, energy, effort, and your life.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You don’t have to be the master of a skill to perform it well enough to get the job done or to achieve your goal.

Likely, your goal is not to become a professor of the topic, and you want to get practical knowledge and pragmatic experience with these skills. Here is what you can do to accelerate your learning as much as possible:

1. Have mentors and support networks

So that you can share and discuss your knowledge with. Mentors are people of a stronger skill, and support network will have folks who are much closer to you in their learning path.

Additionally, have an accountability buddy who will hold you accountable for the plans and mini-goals that you are setting.

2. Teach what you’ve learned to others

This may manifest literally in you giving a lecture to someone else. Or you could start a blog where you describe your learning journey, or you can have a YouTube channel where you talk about that and present your learnings in a simple form.

This way, people like you, 2 weeks behind you, can learn the topic faster than you did. Make it even simpler and more accessible to them. If you can’t make it easy and straightforward to understand, that means that you have not learned it enough.

3. Read the best books on this topic

Practice speed-reading because most books have a lot of filler content to satisfy the requirements of the publisher and editors. Filler content sometimes is incredible, especially examples, but what you really need to have is not all the knowledge of these books in your head (because you can’t do that anyway).

Instead, you want to have a map in your head, where you can look up quickly particular knowledge or how-to of the skill.

Read/subscribe to blogs on the topic that you are reading. Engage with the author and the community around the blog.

4. Practice what you are learning

Have a concrete, specific project that you can be working on and applying the skills that you are learning all the time, in parallel with your other learning activities.

Practice earlier rather than later. The practical experience is essential because it’ll show you where you are still lacking and what parts you still need to learn. This will allow you to dig deeper only on topics that you actually need to complete your project.

5. Present this project to your peers and to your mentors to have them give you feedback

Preferably, find people who are capable of providing constructive feedback, so that you can properly learn from it.

6. When learning, try to make analogies to existing concepts that you already know

Connect the new knowledge to already existing one.

For example, you can always relate seemingly unrelated fields, like programming and trains: train cars connected to each other can represent a linked list data structure.

Try to always look for such relations. Your brain will remember the information much, much better, and will gain an intuitive understanding of it.

7. Take notes as you are learning

Take notes as you are talking to your peers, mentors, or students. Take notes as you are working and encountering difficulties and challenges. Take notes when you have successfully overcome the issue.

Take notes on the paper with a pen, preferably. Digitally is okay (and better than not taking notes at all); it’s just that taking notes by hand is so much more potent. You might as well do that. Have your pen and notebook always ready to go.

8. Learn how to learn

There are whole books and extensive studies on the topic, for example, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt, and Leveraged Learning by Danny Iny. I particularly enjoyed these two.

The better you are at “learning as a skill” (and it is a trainable skill), the faster you will learn anything! So even if your current learning speed is not as fast as you would like, it’ll improve the more you practice it.

9. Practice mindfulness meditation

If you are just starting out, 5 minutes every day should be enough.

This is important as it makes your pre-frontal cortex stronger (the most critical thinking part of your brain). You can say that meditation is a workout for your mind.

10. Keep your body and mind healthy

Make sure you get enough sleep, and you eat properly. Have a good schedule. If you can, a fixed schedule every day. This will reduce the stress levels and will allow you to learn and perform much more efficiently.

Have a good diet. Eat enough brain foods, like fruits and nuts. Get at least a few minutes of exercise daily.

11. Use sleep to your advantage

As we sleep, our brain is organizing all the information that you have gained on that day. And especially, it gives special attention to what was on your mind just before you went to sleep (in the evening and pre-bedtime).

This is why you should spend time working and studying in the evening (instead of watching TV). And just before going to bed, you should review your day, and plan for the next one. Here you can find more things you can do to prime your brain to do very productive work while you are sleeping.

Additionally, you can nap in between your learning and practicing sessions, so that your new knowledge and experience get processed by the brain properly and quickly.

12. Use brainwave entrainment technology

That will increase your level of focus and the power of your memory and recall.

A good example here would be to get Gamma Binaural Beats or Isochronic Tones and listen to them while you are studying or practicing. You can read more about how they work and the research behind this tech here.

13. Replace the usual forms of entertainment with entertainment that is related to your topic and can educate you

For example, if you are trying to learn math, instead of watching just funny videos on Youtube, start watching funny videos about math (from great science communicators) that also will teach you something new.

This way, you are killing 3 birds with one stone. You are still learning the topic you need, you are relaxing and getting some happy laughs, and you are replacing a bad habit of mindless consumption of useless entertainment with a more healthier one.

Also, take notes when you learn something new—this will upgrade your experience as the brain will love doing this activity even more.

14. Use any downtime for learning, as well.

For example, when you are waiting in the queue, have your phone ready and charged, with headphones readily available so that you can: listen to a podcast about your topic, watch a video or a course, read a book, or listen to an audiobook, etc.

Another example is if you need to go to the restroom, you can make it your throne of learning. That’s a so-called toilet university, where you spend maybe even 5-10 minutes more time there to watch a course or read a few pages of a book.

When you start to look for these opportunities, you’ll find them anywhere: waiting for food in the cafe, eating, drinking your morning coffee, in commute, etc.

Principally, don’t let a second of your time go wasted.

15. Of course, it makes sense to use downtime sometimes just to have a break and let your brain rest.

Just make sure that you are really relaxing and letting your brain process everything, instead of bombarding it with new information (and actually tiring it even more out) with a TV, or Netflix, or some other form of useless entertainment.

Instead, take a short walk outside, or just stand, instead of sitting, or do stretches. Anything, but mindless consumption.

Take breaks often enough to let your brain process what you are taking in, and refresh before another deep dive session into knowledge or work. Perhaps use a Pomodoro technique or some focus timer.

Speaking of focus timer, here is what my former colleague is working on: Focus Timer that combines productivity and fun.

16. Practice consuming information at a higher speed

For example, if you are watching a course video, or listening to a podcast, try to use 1.5x speed.

This would be uncomfortable at first, and you may need to rewind a few times, but soon your brain will accommodate. (especially, if you are practicing meditation consistently—it trains this kind of focus skill and brain muscle).

Eventually, with practice, you can get to 2x, 2.5x, and even 3x if the speaker is on a slower side. This alone will save you vast amounts of time. Just don’t forget to take notes so that you actually retain the information you are consuming. Because at such speed without taking notes, you may lose even more.

17. Establish learning groups

Where you can practice the skills together, and maybe even complete a group project. This is awesome because we humans are social beings.

You are going to be more motivated and will pay more attention to the information you are learning. Also, you are going to get immediate feedback, and built-in accountability, so to not let others down.

It’s also fun!

On top of that, you can attend meet-ups about what you’re learning.

18. Interleave practice and learning more often than you would like

The deal is that practice always shows what you are still lacking and what you need to dig deeper into.

Use that to inform what resources you need to study and practice. This way, you are going to learn only precisely what you need for your goals, and you are not going to go too deep on the topic. (Unless you want to be a professor of this domain, you don’t want to go too deep, only to the extent that is practical and pragmatic from the perspective of your goals).

19. Also, it is crucial to remember that skills can always be developed

No matter what initial affinity you have with them!

If you ever feel that “you are not cut out to do X,” then read the book Mindset by Carol S. Dweck. And get inspired to outperform any “talented” with your hard work, tenacity, and by making progress every day.

20. Set goals and challenge yourself

One of the most effective ways to be more efficient and faster at something is to have deadlines you have created for yourself and committed to.

This way, your brain will function at a higher focus level and will think about this learning and practical activity as one of the most essential things in your life.

21. Look back and have a weekly retrospective of what you achieved and what you have learned so far

Celebrate your wins to gain the motivation, energy, and momentum to fix your faults.

22. Speaking of which, it’s crucial to gain a lot of momentum

If you are not able to learn for X amount of hours consistently every day., start small, maybe something like 30 minutes a day, but make it a consistent habit. And then once you are confident you can pull this 30mins every day, without fail, ramp it up to 45 mins, and then to 1h, and then to 2h, and so on.

Keep the momentum going. For us, humans, the momentum is the most potent weapon, either to achieve our goals, aspirations, or dreams or to demolish ourselves (by having momentum in the form of bad habits).

Thank you for reading this article! If you liked it or it inspired you into action, please share it on social media with your following, follow me on Quora, and reach out to me on Twitter.

Learn your best, Nathan.

Originally published as a Quora answer here.

Photo by freestocks.org from Pexels

How to Gain 8 More Productive Hours Every Day?

Nathan J. Luis — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 16:24:02 +0000

On average, a person sleeps 7–9 hours every night. This is healthy sleep, and by no means, I’m saying you shouldn’t do that. The healthier your sleep is, the better!

Did you know that while you sleep, your brain still keeps on working?

For example, in both REM and slow-wave sleep modes, the brain is still firing electrical signals in a large population of neurons with a steady rhythm. If anything, it is much more similar to your normal waking state. Essentially, the brain is not “resting” at all, it’s working. And it’s working quite actively on something.

What is it working on then?

What is Your Brain Working on When Asleep?

It stabilizes the memories you gained throughout the day and makes them easier to recall and harder to forget or misremember. Moreover, the brain does a lot of work to structure these memories, ideas, and thoughts, to filter what needs to stay there for long-term storage, and what can be let go.

These are quite important, because being able to recall what you’ve learned, or what happened, and without too much distortion is essential. Especially if you are working on your most important projects and want to be productive. Additionally, holding onto the vital information and discarding the junk is super useful too!

And finally, the most important thing that our mind is doing during sleep is to form new ideas out of the ones that kept us busy the previous day(s).

This last point is why sometimes you can struggle for the whole day and evening with a problem, unsuccessfully, only to wake up the next morning with a burning idea on how to solve it. You can say it’s your sleeping superpower and why you shouldn’t sacrifice your sleep to do more of “productive” work. Your precious sleep hours just may be much more productive than the gain you intended to get.

Before I tell you how you can leverage most of the productivity of your sleep, I think I should tell you how you might be wasting it!

Sure Way to Waste Your Night Sleep Productivity

The best way to make your brain work on the wrong things is to do or consume wrong things the evening and the night before bed.

For example, if you spend your before-bed time watching a TV show, your brain will focus most of these eight productive hours crunching ideas and information in that show. If you are this show’s producer, maybe that is useful to you, but not for the majority of other ambitious folks.

So, I really, really encourage you to stop mindlessly consuming content in the evening and at the pre-bedtime, like watching TV shows, browsing funny YouTube videos, reading social media, or binge-watching the new series season on Netflix.

Even though it may feel like these things can help you relax, destress, or decompress, this is not actually true. These forms of entertainment are designed to capture 100% of your attention without any effort on your side. That means that the level of focus, concentration, and alertness that your brain is “forced” to exercise may even be higher than when you are working on your side project in a productive focus session!

What should you do instead then?

1. Learn or Practice a New Skill

If you know that you need a particular skill right now or very soon, it’s a good idea to replace entertainment in the evening with learning and skill practice.

The good night’s sleep is actually perfect for cementing what you learn and giving you insights you would otherwise not have (like how you can apply this new skill creatively in your day job, or in your side project). This is because of how memories and ideas are being re-organized for maximum efficiency during good sleep.

If you are struggling with how much energy you have for learning (for example, if you are exhausted after a full day of work), check out if this optimized schedule can help you.

2. Do Some Deep Work

If you work on your challenges, even for a little bit, and especially if you leave specific problems unresolved before your bedtime, your brain will focus on these. You just might have a fantastic surge of inspiration and new ideas in the next morning!

Because you don’t have to actually complete anything, as little as putting 20–30 minutes of deep, uninterrupted work is enough to trigger this effect.

If you are experiencing trouble staying focused in the evening, learn here how you can become laser-focused when working on your goals.

3. Program Your Brain to Work on Your Goals With This Nightly Routine

As already mentioned, your brain keeps processing what happened during the day. And it gives much more attention to things that kept your mind busy in the evening and just before going to sleep. Therefore you can prime your brain to work towards your goals during your sleep.

The pre-bedtime routine described in the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, allows you to give your brain orders what information it should be crunching during your sleep.

The routine consists of 5 simple steps:

1. Review today

Ask yourself the following questions and write your answers down:

— What did I accomplish today?
— How many hours did I work productively today?
— What did I learn today?
— What one thing do I need to improve on tomorrow?

2. Write down top-3 (or top-5) tasks you need to complete tomorrow

These should be the most critical tasks. If you can’t accomplish anything else tomorrow, these are the ones that you’ll prioritize above all. If you are still struggling with after-work productivity, start with smaller goals here. This is important because it takes a lot of willpower to plan what needs to be done, and you want this plan to be already prepared, so the next time you have a free minute, you can just start executing on it.
—
Make sure to include one task that is hard for you to do, so that you can grow, preferably, every day. Also, include when and where you will do it to maximize your chances of following through.

3. Write in your journal

It’s vital to declutter your mind before going to sleep. Journalling can help you with that. You want to include the following points:

— Your dreams and goals. Reminding your brain of why you’re trying to be productive in the first place will help it focus more on these goals and aspirations during sleep. Make sure to describe your dreams and goals as vividly as possible.
— Open writing. Just open your journal and start writing whatever is on your mind. This ultimately clears your mind, and may even provide some insights right now, or in the future.
— Gratitude. Write down everything you are grateful for and thankful for. It could be people, or something you’ve done today, or an event that happened. Among other things, this will keep stress at bay, help you develop better bonds and relationships, make you feel more secure and happier, and, most importantly, inspire you and increase your creativity.

4. Write down your short-term and long-term goals

Writing your goals before going to bed will make your brain work hard on thinking how these goals can be achieved. It’ll get you inspired to put in the work tomorrow. Repetition is also necessary: if you write the same goals every night, that will make a shift in how you approach your life, your time, and how do you think. I particularly like it to structure in the following format (you may not have answers to all of these questions yet. And that’s okay, you’ll figure it out down the way):

— What do you want to accomplish in the next month?
— In the next 2 months?
— In a quarter?
— In a year?
— In 5 years?
— In 10 years?
— In life?

5. Visualize you succeeding at your goals and achieving your dreams

Doing this just before sleep will make your brain desire it even more, and will invigorate your passion. This will create a burning desire to accomplish your goals and will cause you to take real actions towards it. Next morning, you’ll wake up fully charged to achieve your dreams!
—
If you have a particular challenge, you can write it down in detail here, as well. Of course, do this only if you want your brain to be focused mostly on this problem that night, and not others.

Depending on what happened during the day, and how many things you have on your mind, the routine can take from 15 to 45 minutes to complete.

I personally use it every evening, just before going to bed. I have made a template for myself that I copy-paste every time, and just fill in the blanks on my computer. This makes it much easier to get started and get through the routine, even if I am tired.

This routine is so powerful that it can turn you from an uninspired chronic entertainment consumer into a super-productive beast. It changed my life, and I hope it will change yours!

Uncage Yourself

I want to help ambitious people like yourself.

The focus is to support you to have the time and energy to work on ambitious goals, become more autonomous and independent in your decisions, work, and life, get recognized by a wider community and attain the freedom that you deserve as a human being.

That’s why I’ve started this publication, “Uncaged You”. I’m writing 2–4 times a week about these topics.

Thank you for reading!

If you liked this article or found it useful, please make sure to leave a comment below with your thoughts on the topic, and share the post on Twitter.

You can follow me on Twitter here, as well.
Best of luck with your aspirations! Nathan.

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How to Get More Energy After Work With This Schedule

Nathan J. Luis — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 18:17:24 +0000

This feeling of being utterly exhausted after a full day of work for the employer, with no energy left for your own goals.

You probably can fight this feeling and put in some quality work for a few days, and then crash down with over-exhaustion and not able to do anything in the evening for a month or two.

As you live from paycheck to paycheck, Monday to Friday, wasting every weekend to decompress so that you can run for another workweek for someone else, the feelings of regret are building up.

You start to think that you’ll never be able to accomplish your goal.

I know precisely how that feels. It’s a vicious spiral that, with each day, makes it even less likely for you to do anything useful with your precious hours of “your time.” You could also start over-indulging in various ways to “forget all about” this problem (like passive entertainment, alcohol, meaningless parties, etc.).

Imagine if you could find a way to get a surge of energy and motivation right after work so that you can go ahead and spend 2–3 hours on yourself and your projects. On top of that, it is healthy and doesn’t have any adverse long-term effects.

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

In this article, I’m going to compare two workday schedules: the usual one, most of the 9-to-5(6) workers are living, and a heavily optimized one that lets you have more energy in the evening, after work.

Let’s start by looking at your current schedule (give or take 1h there and there).

Normal (Average) Schedule

Usually, full-time employees work and sleep in the following schedule (add +/- 1 hour in a few places, and you’ll probably get your own):

23:00–07:00 Night sleep
07:00–09:00 Breakfast, shower, commute, etc.
09:00–12:00 Working (for the employer), productively, until lunchtime
12:00–13:00 Lunch break
13:00–16:00 Working (for the employer), still productive
16:00–18:00 Working (for the employer), sluggishly, getting tired and exhausted now
18:00–19:00 Commute home, grocery shopping, etc.
19:00–22:00 Spending time with the family, and trying to work on something at least for an hour or two, but too exhausted and tired. Watching TV, YouTube, or Netflix instead.

Here is how that would look like in a chart:

As you can see, you start getting tired at the end of the workday, and when you want to put in the quality hours into your own project, you are exhausted.

This time (between 3–6) is actually relatively typical for a human to get drowsy and tired. In the past, people were taking a nap at this time, as their bio-rhythms require so. Even some modern cultures in the world are still doing that. This nap is called Siesta.

Let’s take a look at how we can optimize your schedule to align it with your bio-rhythm and get the most out of your evening “free hours.”

Optimized Schedule For Evening Work

Here is what you can do: remove exclusive lunch (and eat lunch while you work, this way you can be done with your day job one hour early), and add a Siesta (midday nap). You could also start 1 hour earlier to get even one more bonus hour. Here is an example of how you can transform your schedule:

23:00–06:00 Night sleep
06:00–08:00 Morning routine, commute
08:00–12:00 Work productively (for your employer)
12:00–12:30 Work (for your employer) & Eat your lunch at the same time
12:30–15:00 Work productively (for your employer)
15:00–16:00 Work until end of your day (for your employer), getting tired now
16:00–18:00 Siesta nap for 90–120 minutes. This is a full sleep cycle, you’re going to wake up refreshed and energized. Just don’t forget to set up a timer for 100 or 110 minutes. Or, better yet, use an app that can wake you up exactly at the end of your sleep cycle. Like this one or that one. This makes waking up super easy, and you feel really well after that.
18:00–19:00 Commute home, grocery shopping, etc.
19:00–21:00 Deep work time! (on your goals) Not tired anymore
21:00–22:00 Spend time with family, do home chores.

Here is how your day will look like visually:

This sleep pattern (and overall schedule) is one of the most optimal for working on your side projects after work in the evening. You can shift hours to your liking to suit yourself, your family, and your employer, of course. The trick is to get a Siesta nap right after work and before putting quality time into your own goals.

Now it’s your turn

With this fantastic schedule, you can slowly and surely chip away at your goal and get there much quicker than you would be able to with the average day job worker’s schedule.

The most significant bit for you now is to stay laser-focused during your free project time in the evening. You can also make your productivity and focus fun with this app.

You just gained this time, don’t waste it by being unfocused!

Now it’s your turn (and your responsibility), go ahead and start making arrangements with your boss and your partner or family to transition into this schedule. Good luck!

Uncage Yourself

I want to help ambitious people like yourself.

That’s why I’ve started this publication, “Uncaged You.”

Thank you for reading!

If you liked this article or found it useful, please make sure to leave a comment below with your thoughts on the topic, and share the post on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter here, as well.

Best of luck with your aspirations! Nathan.

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How to Focus Like a Titan of Productivity?

Nathan J. Luis — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 18:30:17 +0000

Can you make a difference in this world?

It’s a great question, you know. We all should be asking that to ourselves. Some people can make a difference by being excellent professionals. Professionals who master their craft every day and every evening.

Entrepreneurs also sometimes make a difference and leave some kind of legacy in this world. Of course, their creations may be fleeting sometimes. But you know rarely they just happen to change the world.

Do you feel like you’ve done a lot of useful stuff today? And what about yesterday?

I know that feeling when you just cannot focus at all. Or perhaps you’re getting interrupted all the time by meetings, phone notifications, and people at your workplace. So much so that you can’t even get any real work done.

This moment, when you, the next day in the morning, can’t even tell what have you been doing the last day at all. One thing you can say that you’ve spent time in meetings or being interrupted, though.

Or perhaps you are self-employed, but you have still wasted your whole yesterday by watching some entertainment and playing games?

Aren’t those supposed to make you happy and make you have fun?

So why the heck are you feeling like crap?

That feeling of guilt, regret, that’s what your inner self is trying to tell you that what you’ve done is useless beyond belief. You know that everybody in this world just has to leave something behind, right?

Our legacy. That’s how we humans are built.

Pretty sure if we didn’t have that driver, our society and humanity would be long gone. For some people raising the next generation — is that. For some other folks, scientific discoveries and for others is a successful renowned career. And so on. So, what is it for you?

Whatever it is, you need to make sure you are moving in the right direction. In the course of this super achievement, life-level achievement.

If you look at yourself in the mirror today, what will you see? Is it a successful person who is crushing their goals and is achieving their dreams? Or is it a complete opposite of that, reckless addict of today’s world numerous distractions?

Imagine a better self

How would a better self turn out? Ignoring fleeting distractions and consumer entertainment designed to make you addicted to it. Working on your own thing or for someone else and becoming a renowned entrepreneur or professional.

Imagine if you could discard all of the world’s distractions and focus immediately, at your will, right at the moment, when you need it? And then you’d blast through your most important work like it’s nothing.

What if you were a titan of productivity?

Luck, muse, creativity or genius

What is it I hear? You need inspiration for the kind of work you’re trying to do, and you don’t have any? Or maybe you need luck to succeed, muse, or that burst of creativity, or a genius thought?

I know how it feels to be powerless and think that you don’t have it in you. But let me make this problem easy-to-solve for you.

Muse, luck, and genius find people who are already working. Just keep on working on your thing diligently. Even if the work you’re doing is of not high quality that you want it to be. Copy others if you must, but never stop producing — be it writing, software, ideas, products, math theorems, paintings, inventions, etc.

Act of doing conditions your brain to want to do more, and it starts to work the matter in your mind responsible for the respective source of inspiration.

You, producing — is your own source of inspiration!

Alright, let’s talk through specific solutions to the focus problem, how can you become a titan of productivity:

1. Change your environment

The easiest way to prevent distractions is to put yourself in an environment where they are not possible or change your setting that distractions are just not likely.

Let me give you an example: imagine that your most dangerous enemy is youtube on your phone. Then go ahead, enable parental control, or restricted content mode on your phone. Then have your partner or close friend you can trust, put a password for you so that you don’t know what it is. Then, the next thing you do is add a youtube app and website in the BLOCK list.

Now every time you try to open that app or website, it’ll just be blocked without any options to unblock. Do the same thing on all your devices, and suddenly you have focus time where you can produce awesome stuff, and you have a boredom time where you can think and get inspired to work more on your goals.

Ask yourself a question, what is in your environment that makes it easy to get distracted or makes it hard to focus? Go ahead and fix it. Even with unusual methods that are not accepted by the general public. Remember, you don’t want to be just one grain of sand in that general public!

2. Make a detailed plan of what you’re trying to accomplish

Our brain likes to win. Completing a small, manageable task gives your brain motivation to achieve even more items. If you went ahead and split your multi-week project into the most trivial of tasks that each can be completed in like 3–7 minutes, it’s going to be so much easier to get started.

As soon as you complete the first task like that, your brain will feel a burst of dopamine, feeling of “win.”

Now, if you keep completing these tasks one at a time, you will accrue an unstoppable momentum. Moreover, with small work items like that, it’s actually easy to get distracted and get back into focus faster, if you have to (for example, need to talk with a coworker or attend a meeting, or just go eat dinner with your family).

Of course, making a plan like that could be a daunting task on its own. So instead, plan only a few first steps. Perhaps to keep you busy for the next 1–2 hours. That can be done in 5–7 minutes on its own, and therefore it is your first micro-task.

3. Block chunks of time to deep work

Negotiate with your family, partner, or team that you want to work undisturbed during certain times.

If you can make it a consistent time every day (for example, from 12–3 pm), then it’s like the best option that you can have.

If that’s not possible, then you could negotiate maybe one or two stable days where you can have a fixed focus time block, or you could have completely fluid blocks of time that you plan every morning or the evening the day before.

Make sure that this time is when your mind is most calm, or you are the most creative, or you can exercise the most focus and alertness. It depends on your type of work that you are trying to accomplish.

4. Use a focus timer

If you have trouble keeping focus for long periods, then you should try out one of the focus timers. The essence of all of these is that you promise yourself to work with a single laser focus on your next task(s) in the list of your micro-plan (you’ve made before) and then when you’re done with that challenge (for example work focused for 30 minutes), you can have a 5–10 minutes of break.

This is quite powerful and can make chronically unfocused people exercise god-like focus.

5. Prepare a reward for yourself

You know how all the entertainment you so love (and feel later horrible about wasting your time and energy on it instead of productive work on your goals and ambitions) can be used for your own good?

Imagine that you love watching some fun videos on Youtube. But you have already blocked it on all your devices, and you can no longer consume it.

And you have a trusted partner who has the password to unlock the app for an hour or so.

Now, what you can do is that you can promise to your partner that you will do 4 hours of work on your side hustle, and then they will unlock your device for your favorite entertainment for 1 hour.

Now you have both short-term and long-term motivation to work even harder on your thing. Of course, you have to show your results to the partner, what you have done, what is the output. This way, your brain wouldn’t even think of cheating.

In fact, my former colleague is working on this focus timer app that combines micro-planning, focus timer, and rewards. Check this focus timer app out!

6. Agree on a cue with your team

This applies if you often get distracted by your team because they legitimately need something from you — maybe you are a manager, team lead, or just the most experienced person in the group.

In this scenario, you can just talk to them and establish a visual rule when you can’t be distracted (in a focus session), or you can be distracted (in a break or doing something not focused).

Also, if somebody really needs to know when they can talk to you, you can have your focus timer visible on a big device, like an additional screen or tablet. Folks will see that you have 11 minutes left of your focus session, and then they can come to talk to you again at this time.

7. Work on what’s really important

Apply a rule of ruthless prioritization. Quickly and snappily decide on the activity if it’s worth your focused work, or it can be done in a non-focus block of time, or can it be perhaps delegated? Maybe you can hire a (virtual) assistant?

Plus, there are certain things that you think you should do, but when you really think about it in terms of your long-term goals, these are just distractions really and should be dropped if possible.

Think about your things to work on in terms of the Eisenhower matrix:

It’s important and urgent — a top priority, you need to do it as soon as you can, within a focus session.
It’s important but not urgent — schedule a time to do it; you still need have to complete it at some point.
Not important, but urgent and needs to be done — find a person to help you do it, delegate. If you have no one to delegate to, because you’re an individual contributor, or you are just getting your business off the ground, then delegating means delegating to your non-focus time block. Keep your focus work blocks for the most critical tasks.
Finally, if something is not important and not urgent (at all, or yet), just forget about it. If it becomes urgent later, it’ll come up. When it becomes important — it’ll come up.

8. Make your body healthier

It’s hard to focus or be productive if you feel physiologically like a little piece of crap.

So, fix your diet, start exercising (even if for 4–7 minutes) every single day. A morning is a preferable option. Then have a great breakfast with a lot of nutrition that you need to get through the day.

Fix your sleep schedule, get enough of it, depending on your age and genetics. That might be somewhere between 7 and 10 hours a day.

9. Make your mind healthier

Of course, if you need to focus on your goals, I take it you are working with your brain, right? So-called knowledge worker.

As the brain is your primary source of income and outcomes for your goals, make sure it is in a healthy state and in tip-top shape ready to perform beyond what’s considered regular and average.

Eat foods that are full of nutrients for your brain, exercise every day without fail (this habit makes brain happier too), sleep enough, and with a good schedule. The mind gets restored during sleep, and sleep deprivation can permanently damage your frontal cortex and other parts of your brain, so don’t let your most potent and vital weapon go rusty and break down.

Last but not least, meditate regularly. Mindfulness meditation is like an exercise or workout for your brain — it makes it stronger.

In fact, there is research proving that folks who periodically meditate mindfully have their amount of gray matter increased in the section of the pre-frontal cortex. This section is responsible for all the fantastic things we do as humans, such as cognitive functions and regulatory/control functions. Additionally, It reduces the size and influence of your lizard brain, that just wants to consume entertainment and be lazy, and is the center of fear and fight or flight response.

This has additional benefits that it allows you to perform acts that are above average and be less afraid of rejection by society, and that is how humans become more successful.

10. Track leading indicators instead of results

The problem with most worthwhile goals is that the fruits of your labor will show themselves way… way later, sometimes, even a few decades later than when you got started. It’s tough to persist through such a hellish waiting time and keep doing what you’re doing and not get discouraged.

That is because what ambitious people like you are trying to achieve is always a long-term thing. Now, you could, of course, track short-term things as well, but that is quite bad. A lot of short-term indicators/results may not lead to good long-term results.

So what do you do?

You track the leading indicators instead. For example, if you want to write a book, you count how many hours you spent writing it. If you’re going to develop an app, you track how many hours have you spent researching, designing, or writing the code of that app.

If you are looking to create a startup, but still in the idea validation phase, you can track how many experiments did you launch and how many of them had concluded with a pivot/persevere result. Also, you do track how many hours you spent designing or analyzing these experiments, of course.

Obviously, like any metric, these leading indicator metrics can be gamed. E.g., you could spend hours and hours doing non-important work that can be done as late as 4 months from now, and there is something important that has to be done urgently, and you are avoiding that piece of work.

So, in addition to leading indicator metrics, you also want to track the quality of these indicators. If it is hours, then are these hours put in the most important tasks or auxiliary.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to put time and effort in auxiliary work, because your brain and body need to rest and destress from the most important tasks from time to time, so make sure to keep these in proper balance. Probably something like 5-to-3 or 6-to-2 is a good ratio of important/urgent tasks to not-so-important tasks.

Tracking your efforts like that will make your brain experience more “wins” and celebrations, all the while making progress to your long-term goals, at a steady and confident pace. This will serve as a good habit/reinforcing loop to make you put more focused and productive work into your thing, which will eventually lead you to success.

Why would it lead you to success? Because the majority just doesn’t do anything or spend time doing useless non-important things, to make them believe that they are doing anything at all useful with their life. You are already by heaps ahead of them, so they’ll never catch up. And the competition among the people who put in the work that is important and laser-focused is just too small. You can be a single fish in the pond almost always if you’re a titan of productivity.

11. Use Brainwave Entrainment technology

There are few well-researched technologies such as binaural beats (that was discovered way back, in the 1830s) that primarily affects your brain to produce a different kind of electric impulses. Usually, you are in a normal waking or relaxed state.

If you listen to Gamma brainwave entrainment, for example, you can get into the state of a very high focus and alertness, and increase your empathy levels, improve memory, recall, and senses.

It all sounds like something that can help you focus. In fact, folks who regularly enter Gamma, they are so accustomed to it, that they can become ultra-focused in just a few seconds, and start doing the work, even if they don’t feel like, or the work is a real tedious chore.

Imagine how awesome it would be to train such a superpower, and superpower it is!

Now it’s your turn!

Thank you for reading. Now I have a question for you:

Which techniques are you using to improve your focus? What methods did you try that didn’t stick or didn’t work? Why do you think that happened?

Please leave a reply in comments and share this article on Twitter!

Photo by Kyle Johnson on Unsplash