How To Stay Focused Throughout the Day
If you’re anything like me, you probably find it hard to stay focused sometimes, especially with distractions coming from every angle.
In fact, when I arrived at work today I was distracted by an email, a Facebook notification on my phone, a Slack message, and a colleague passing by to ask a question. This all happened within the first 20 minutes of me being at work.
Apparently I’m not alone in this situation too – recent research from the University of California found that the typical office worker is interrupted every 11 minutes.
So, if you work for 8 hours in a day, you’ll be distracted 43 times on average.
I was pretty shocked when I first found out about these statistics, so I decided to dig a little bit deeper. Then I found that it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the task at hand with full focus.
That’s right. The average worker is distracted every 11 minutes, and it takes 25 minutes to fully focus on a task again.
It’s evident that distractions can be seriously detrimental to the quality of our work output, so it’s essential that we can decrease the number of distractions that we face every day.
Over the past month I’ve been trying to stay as focused as possible, and I’ve created this article to share the best tactics that I’ve found which helped me to block out distractions during work hours.
Let’s jump into it!
Why Do We Get Distracted?
Before we dive into the list of top tips for staying focused during the workday, it’s important that we understand why we get distracted in the first place.
Whenever your phone vibrates in your pocket, or you hear that “ka-ching” alert after you’ve received an order from your Shopify store, you brain recognizes that alert as something which has changed.
Our brains have defense mechanisms hardwired into them which compel us to check something which is different, just in case it’s a danger to us. And that’s exactly why you feel that burning urge to drop everything that you’re doing and check what the sound or vibration was.
So, there’s nothing wrong with getting distracted – it’s totally normal. But unfortunately, we only have a finite amount of time every day to achieve our goals, and we need to stay focused to achieve them.
(For the record, I love getting distracted by that sweet, sweet “ka-ching” alert.)
Now, we can’t avoid some distractions, like a colleague coming to your desk and asking for help, or a delivery worker arriving at the door with a parcel, but there’s a lot that we can do to ensure that we stay focused throughout the day.
Interested how? Then let’s get started with our top tips for staying focused. https://www.oberlo.com/blog/stay-focused
Andrew Roach
Andrew Roach is a Content Marketer at Oberlo. He is passionate about ecommerce and creating insightful content to help entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses.
