Career Tips – Stay Focused! Use Tech to your Advantage
By: Neil Nepomuceno
Technology can either be a friend or foe – that all depends on how you use it. It may cause distraction to your day-to-day life and divert attention to things that are not important. Here are some tips on how you can maintain focus on your tasks.
Overcome Internal Triggers
While we can’t control the feelings and thoughts that pop into our heads, we can limit what we do with them. Distractions starts from within. Work on removing the root cause, one step at a time.
TIPS:
List down the cause of discomfort, distraction, and unproductive habits that may be classified as an internal trigger in your Mobile Notes App. You can change your perspective by looking at the “fun” side in your tasks to remove distractions.
Plan and execute your tasks
Now that you’ve identified where distractions are coming from, it’s time to improve your day-to-day schedules to ensure peak performance at work.
TIPS:
Improve your “to-do list” by including every important detail in your tasks. You may also use a Kanban-style list-making applications that are readily available in the web. It is more enticing to do a task when you can see everything that needs to be done in one glance.
Remove External Triggers
Identify the triggers first. These may come in the form of excess time spent on social media apps or video games. At work, even the seemingly harmless notifications from our emails, messaging apps, and loud music can affect our workflow.
TIPS:
Answer the question: Are these triggers serving me, or am I serving it? That way, you can cull external triggers that aren’t serving you any good purpose.
Avoid “chimping” your phone
In photography, the term ‘chimping’ refers to the habit of checking every photo on the camera display after taking each photo. This habit may leave the Photographer missing the important frame when covering an event.
The same applies for the split-second glance at your phone to chat with your friends or reading a pop-up notification. This may hurt your productivity levels when it becomes a habit.
TIPS:
Monitor your phone usage and adjust accordingly. Most Smartphones can now give you a detailed graph about your screen time, App usage number of unlocks, and more. For Android users, you may find this by going to settings > Digital Well-being. For iOS users, you simply go to settings and search for Screen time.