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By Phil, February 1, 2010 2:17 pm

Reading time – 2 minutes 24 seconds

Find your rhythm

Continuing our series on Finding Focus in 2010 – click here to subscribe and never miss another post.

I have sincere apology to make.  This is for anyone who has ever come into contact with me in the morning before my first cup of coffee.  You may know me as the “live life to the full” writer of Less Ordinary Living, however before 8.30am when the caffeine kicks in, I look and act like a bedraggled plane crash survivor who has spent 3 years surviving on berries in the jungle.  If you’ve experienced this I am truly sorry.

The serious side of this it that we are all subject to natural body rhythms that control our energy levels each day.  During our development we find our unique pattern that works with our metabolism, lifestyle and preferences.  By adulthood, the Circadian Rhythms we have developed become deeply ingrained.  Understanding and working with these rhythms can have a huge effect on our ability to focus and be effective every day.

I only recently became aware of my patterns.  I find that I start the day with fairly low levels of energy and these slowly pick up during the morning.  Typically by 9am I start to get into the zone and am in a good place to focus (after the coffee kicks in!).  The energy levels pick up and continue rising until about 1.00pm.  At this point, my energy drops off a cliff for most of the afternoon.  However weirdly (but not uniquely) a second wind start to kick in late afternoon and I get another power surge that can last until 8 or 9pm.  After that, things tail off to the end of the day.

So what is your daily pattern?  Take a minute to draw a graph on a piece of paper and put time on the X axis (starting from when you wake up and ending when you hit the sack).  You can then map energy levels on the Y axis.  Think through a typical day and your relative levels of energy during the day and start to map this on the graph.  Most people have varying levels of energy during a day and so you will probably get some kind of curve or wave.  If you’re not sure, take a day or two to watch yourself and your energy levels throughout the day until the pattern emerges.

The key now is to use this information wisely by matching activities to energy levels.  When you are putting together your daily plan, try to schedule your highest priority activities which require the most energy and concentration in your times of peak energy.  It is much easier to focus and avoid distraction when we our energy is at its highest.  Likewise, if you have an obvious lull during the day, this is a great time to either knock off some of the tedious, easy chores that need to be done, or to schedule in some personal care time (exercise, mediation, reading).  Much better to use this time productively than to waste an hour looking up America’s Next Top Model on Wikipedia (not that I’ve ever done this, obviously).

Experiment with what works best for you each day.  Because of my pattern, I have deliberately moved my lunchtime back to about 1.30pm to take full advantage of my first high energy peak.  I’ve also found that scheduling meetings and phone calls for my traditionally “low energy” times forces me to concentrate and can make this formerly dead time much more productive.  As you get more confident you can guide others to make sure that meetings happen at times that work best for you.

So apologies again to anyone who has met the Phil “pre-coffee” monster!  For the rest of you, please do give this a try and leave a comment to let me know how this works out for you in becoming more focused.

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By Phil, January 25, 2010 6:17 pm

Reading time: 3 minutes and 15 seconds

Two powerful ways to boost your focus and improve productivity every day – click here to subscribe and never miss another post

Find your focus - picture: Sergi's Blog

“Its such a perfect day – I wish I spent it with you” – Lou Reed, Perfect Day

Imagine a perfect day of focus.  From the minute you open your eyes, you are energised, in the zone and ready to go.  Throughout the day, you effortlessly work through your top priorities and get them done.  You deflect the interruptions with grace and constructively deal with the challenges that arise.  As you wind down at the end of the day, you feel fulfilled, content and satisfied.  This may sound unrealistic, unobtainable and a little bit crazy, however why not try to get as close as possible to this?

I’ve struggled with finding focus on a daily basis.  I’m a well known procrastinator, particularly when it comes to doing the most important (and for that read scary) things.  Yet recently I’ve found two really powerful techniques that have helped me immensely to move closer to having the perfect day, and here they are:

1. Plan out your day in scrupulous detail

One problem I had with being focussed and effective each day was that I didn’t even know what focus looked like.  To change this, I have taken to setting aside time each morning to create an incredibly detailed plan of attack for the day.  Starting with my prioritized to-do list (I’ll share how to create this later in the week), I work out the key priorities for the day – this includes things from work, my personal life and also how I’m going to take care of myself.  I use my calendar to see how much time I have available to make sure that this is realistic.  I then create an incredibly detailed programme for the day ahead with a blow by blow account of EXACTLY what order I will do everything and the timing for this.  For example today’s schedule looks like this:

8.30am Meditate

8.45am – Send key emails (and I have a list of exactly which ones)

9.15am – Clear out email accounts

10.00am – Go to Coffee Shop – Write four blog posts

12.30pm – Return home

12.45pm – Run – 4 miles tempo run

1.15pm – Post run stretching, shower

1.40pm – Lunch – spaghetti bolognese

2.00pm – Put postings on Linked In

2.30pm – Business Telephone calls (again I have a list of which ones)

3.30pm – Design ideal client experience

5.30pm – Scheduled business call

6.00pm – Do Crossword and relax

6.30pm – Send out personal emails

7.00pm – Cook supper, relax and read

Anyone who knows me will realise that this is the antithesis of my laid back personality.  Yet the remarkable thing is that it is 11.38am and I’m in the coffee shop finishing my second blog post of the day.

I’ve found that knowing what you want to achieve creates a real sense of focus and even if you follow the plan with 80% success, those days feel remarkably productive.  Mapping out your perfect day in obsessive detail is no guarantee of success every time, yet it gets you focused on what is most important and helps to reduce the draw of distractions during the day.  It is easier to get back on track and know what to revert to if you are thrown a curve-ball.

2. Act like you are being audited

This powerful technique came from the Change your Thoughts blog.  The key here is to act as if your actions are being audited each day.  Imagine that at the end of each day you have to justify what you did to a super critical auditor who will make you account for every second.  How easily could you justify what you did today?

To put this technique into practice, start out by “meeting the auditor” twice a day for a week – at lunchtime and at the end of the day.  Each time you meet, you need to justify your time since the last meeting – explain what you have done and what makes that important and useful.  You also have to explain your less productive time – that half hour on Facebook, the twenty minutes in the bathroom, the 3 hours watching TV.  Remember the auditor is not there to judge, only to listen and record.

The objective of this process is not to beat ourselves up, or to take all the fun out of life, it is simply to find focus.  One of my primary values is to take better care of myself and develop inner peace and happiness.  For me, finding time to meditate, run, read and simply relax and get quality time is justified and I can look the auditor in the eye with good conscience.   However, if I goofed out on the important deadline that I had and didn’t make an important call to go running, that is harder to justify.

Over time, your inner auditor will become internalised.  You’ll feel them looking over your shoulder as you start your game of Tetris and go back to finishing your spreadsheet.  It will become easier and easier to justify your time at the meetings as you find your focus improving.

So the perfect day may not happen every day, however using these techniques you can get closer to a focused and effective day to day existence.  As with all personal change some days will be better than others and you’ll need to be kind to yourself when the less good days come along.  However with persistence and patience you’ll find the Perfect Day may just be possible.  Let me know how your perfect day is, by commenting.

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By Phil, January 20, 2010 5:33 pm

Reading time: 2 minutes and 45 seconds

Continuing the series on Finding Focus in 2010 – 3 powerful steps to beat procrastination and overcome fear.  Click here to subscribe and never miss another post – and you’ll help us get to our big target of 500 subscribers (currently 115).  Thank you!

“There is nothing to fear except fear itself” Franklin D. Roosevelt

Fear – gut-wrenching, stomach-churning foreboding.  Even thinking about fear sends a shiver down my spine.  Despite this, we should all be quite grateful to our biology for this emotion.  In its primal form it is there to protect us from harm – the sabre-tooth tiger hiding in the bushes or falling over the edge of a cliff.   Unfortunately this instinct can also be a real obstacle to finding focus in our lives.  It can paralyse us with inactivity, drive procrastination and avoidance, and distract us from the here and now.  Feeling the fear and doing it anyway may be a  a cliché, however learning to manage fear can increase our focus and effectiveness .

When we feel afraid, our ever-active brains conjure up a future scenario that typically involves failure and impending doom.  Before we know it, looking for a new and more fulfilling job leads to us being rumbled by the boss, fired, losing our homes and destitute on the street, stealing to feed our families.  All this imagination requires a lot of energy and takes our eye off the ball of what is happening in the present moment.  Fear also generates powerful hormonal responses in our body (that tightness in the stomach) that literally make us freeze.  Gripped by fear, it is normal to abandon that important phone call, and find something less scary to do (this is where Google and Facebook often kick in for me).  This often causes us to lose all focus on what needed to be done and go into a loop of procrastination and delay.

Learning to understand and manage fear is the first step to overcoming it.  Here is a simple three-step process to start dealing with fear:

1. Find your fear

The first step to making a change is to understand what is happening.  Next time you find yourself procrastinating and wasting time, or avoiding an important task, stop for a minute.  The first thing to do is to figure out what is going on, and these questions may help:

• What activity am I procrastinating about?
• What is behind this – what am I afraid of?  (The most common fears include, fear of taking a risk, fear of failure, fear of rejection and fear of humiliation)
• What unfortunate consequences am I anticipating and attaching to this activity?  (Let your imagination really go wild here).

Often we internalise and hide our fears, so take a little extra time to ensure you get to the root cause of the problem.

2. Rationalise your fear

Next, it is time to explore the situation.  Fear tends to be irrational and based on our own wild imagination’s ability to whip up a terrifying scare story.  Think through some of these questions:

• How realistic is the scenario I’ve created?
• What are other potential outcomes?
• What would the consequences of these be?
• How would I handle these consequences in reality?
• How rational is this fear, really?
• What is the best decision to make in the moment based on my desired outcome?

The objective here is to come back into the present moment and decide the most logical step to take right now.   If you are still stuck with your fear, try this next step:

3. The Power of Ten

Think through the activity you are planning to undertake.  Now ask yourself if you are to do it, how important are the potential consequences in ten hours time?  What about in ten days, ten weeks, ten months or ten years.  Use these answers to assess the fear you feel.  This helps to provide a better perspective on making choices and to diminish fear of the future implications.

Fear is a hardwired into our DNA and learning to manage fear’s effects takes time and determination.  Not one day goes by where I don’t feel afraid about something I need to do.  However, these simple steps can help us to be brave and achieve things we dreamed of but thought were impossible.  This process helps us to take life one small and determined step at a time and be more focussed every day.

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By Phil, January 12, 2010 6:19 pm

Reading time: 3 minutes and 25 minutes

Find your focus

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why its called the present” Eleanor Roosevelt

Finding your focus feels absolutely amazing!  The feeling of being absolutely together, engaged, energised and able to give our full attention to whatever we are doing is pretty much unbeatable.  The biggest irony is that when we are focused it is completely effortless to be there, yet it can be one of the most difficult things to achieve.  This month on Less Ordinary Living we are going to explore how you can become more focussed, so click here to subscribe and enjoy every step of this journey.

I think of being focussed as living in the moment – being completely present in our current situation.  When our mind is in this state, we are able to give all of our effort and attention to whatever we are doing or whoever we are with.  If you’ve met a master in being focused, you’ll probably also notice that they have a presence about them  Presence means living in the moment and it is another benefit of finding focus.

Probably the biggest single factor that blurs our focus is our mind.  We’ve all been gifted with a powerful super computer in our head.  However this computer keeps running 24 hours a day, throwing out thoughts and powerful emotions.  These thoughts and emotions typically relate to two things:

1)   The past – our brain is constantly picking over all the data it has taken in from our life to date.  It generates thoughts about what we have experienced, our actions, and the world around us all the time.   We pick over a conversation with our boss, how we reacted to our partner last weekend, our apparent failures to stick to our new years resolution – anything really.  These thoughts also generate emotions which are our response to the stories we are creating – guilt, shame, embarrassment, sadness, joy.

2)   The future – our brain is also imagining the future based on the data available to it.  We create endless permutations about what will happen if….  We tell ourselves that we couldn’t possibly do something because we don’t have the skills or we visualise all the terrible outcomes of taking an action (unemployment, bankruptcy, homelessness, starvation).  Sometimes we daydream about the good things that might happen, and then the dark shadow of fear appears – I couldn’t do that it would be too risky.  The emotions arising when our mind wanders to the future include excitement, anticipation and quite often fear.

The problem with all this is that when our mind is stuck in the past or the future, it blurs our focus.  We lose track of what is happening right now.   When our mind wanders we cannot be present – we phase out of conversations, we start procrastinating because we want to avoid our fears, we blow off our to do list because it our project is doomed to failure in a hundred nasty ways we’ve imagined.

So how do we start to deal with this conundrum and become more present and focussed?  Here are two approaches that will start this process based on my experience:

1)   Awareness. The first step is to become aware of what is going on in our head  Learning to detach from our thoughts and emotions is a powerful step in becoming more focussed.  Try this exercise to become more aware of what is going on upstairs:

• Sit still and take a few deep breaths – try to clear your mind – keep a pen and paper handy
• Try to focus all your attention on your breathing for 3 to 5 minutes
• Thoughts will naturally emerge – when they do, simply observe them and write them down, then return to concentrating on your breathing
• When you are finished, review your list.  Consider where the thoughts came from, which ones were taking you to the past and which to the future, and also consider how this frequency of thoughts affects your concentration and focus.

If you repeat this exercise every day for a week, you’ll start to learn how to detach from your thoughts and become more aware of them.  As you get more proficient, start to become aware of your thoughts and emotions throughout the day.  You may find that even after a week you’ll start to find more focus through this practice.

2)   Focus your attention.  If we train our mind to focus and be in the zone for short periods of time, over time we can learn to keep our mind from jumping into the past or future.  This simple 5 minute exercise is a simple way to do this:

• Find an object that you find beautiful or interesting (a flower, piece of art etc).
• Study the object intensely – take in its shape, colour, texture, structure, smell, feel.  Bring all your attention onto this object and bring your mind into focus on it.  Become absorbed in the object and make it the sole point of your attention for 5 minutes.
• If thoughts arise simply acknowledge them and move your attention back to the object in hand.
• Enjoy this time and at the end, reflect on what it felt like to be really present and focussed.

Again if you practice this exercise repeatedly you’ll find your concentration and focus improving.  You’ll learn to clear your mind of distracting thoughts and emotions from the past or about the future.

So we’ve started our journey towards finding that amazing feeling of focus consistently.  Tune in next time to continue finding your focus, or click here to subscribe so you don’t miss it.

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By Phil, August 27, 2009 12:26 pm

Reading time: 1 minute and 30 seconds

“Concentrate all your thoughts on the work at hand – the sun rays do not burn until brought to a focus” – Alexander Graham Bell

So August is nearly over already – where did it go?  Here at Less Ordinary Towers, we try not to take ourselves too seriously, however the last month has been  a little hectic.  Between blogging, building up my coaching practice, visiting family and friends, filing taxes and various other excitements it feels like I haven’t stopped.

Yesterday, I caught myself babbling away to my lovely wife without taking a breath, and realized that I was wound up like an over-tuned guitar string.  My thoughts were in 5 billion different places at once.  It was time for me to slow down, take a breath and find focus.  For me, focus means being able to concentrate all of my energy and attention on the most important things in my life. It is the state when I’m at my best – productive, energised and happy.

Leading psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi is an expert on focus and has developed the theory of “flow”.  He defines the state of “flow” as when a person is completely in the zone, absorbed in what they are doing and hugely productive.  His research has found a correlation between the feeling of being in “flow” with feeling happier, more satisfied and more creative.  If you’re interested in finding out more this theory and hearing him speak, follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXIeFJCqsPs

All well and good, but with so much going on, how could I start to refocus?  The first thing I did was to slow down a little.  I stated to think for an extra second before acting, walk half a pace more slowly and to pay more attention to the world around me.  Although simple, this started to take away the fraught feelings I had.  Slowing down helped me to feel more in control and to calm the thoughts that had been racing in my head.

The second thing was to take a few quiet minutes to step back and look at the big picture.  I reaffirmed my highest priorities – being a great husband, taking care of myself and helping others to make the most of their lives.  Having done this, I looked at my (massive) to do list with fresh eyes.  It helped me to pick out a few key activities that were most important and to focus on those.  I ended up crossing out a lot of the small annoying things that had been preying on my mind.

Last, yesterday I implemented my first “power hour”.  I picked the most important task that I wanted to achieve, went to my favourite place (the local coffee shop), and turned off all distractions (phone, internet, email).  I set a timer on my watch for 50 minutes and gave absolute focus to the work in hand.  It was amazing how much I achieved.  I finished the hour by rewarding myself with a 10 minute session listening to a couple of my favourite tunes and sipping a latte.  Bliss!

Making these simple changes has helped me to unwind, stop taking myself so seriously and feel much more focussed.  As September rolls around, think about what you need to focus on over the next few months.  Try slowing down, looking at the big picture or taking a daily “power hour” yourself.

We love your comments, so please let us know what you do to find focus, or how slowing down and taking a power hour has helped you.  Also, if you enjoyed this article, please do a good deed and share it with a friend or family member who might appreciate it.