A short YouTube talk by Peter Szabo about improving focus by eliminating distractions rather than trying to force concentration. Szabo recommends tracking time (e.g., logging activities every 30–60 minutes), creating a time inventory to categorize activities by how they contribute to one’s goals, and then eliminating, limiting, automating, or delegating wasteful activities to naturally restore ‘laser-like’ focus.
Chapters
How do you stay focused? I'm Peter Szabo and I'm looking at one of our Facebook groups right now with our private members and a question I got is how do you remain focused? Now, I have a little bit of a counterintuitive approach to this, but it works. A lot of people think they get focused by trying to focus harder, right. They try to go through these courses on time management and whatnot, and maybe it helps a little bit, right? It's an incremental increase, but still they're getting distracted. They can't focus and they don't get really much further ahead because it takes that focus. Right. I mean, there's a video if you Google it by, I think it was Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, they were asked, what's the number one secret to your success? And they both said focus. Right. Especially nowadays in the 21st century with smartphones pinging at us from, you know, different directions and, and all this craziness going on. There's so much stimuli, so much information that the average person in the 21st century is completely unfocused is the opposite of focus. Right? So how can such a person become successful? Well, really hard. So how do you get that focus back? How can you unlock that laser like focus? And the answer is a little weird, but here it is. You do not get focused by trying to focus harder. You, you get focused by eliminating distraction. That's it. So it's very simple. Make a list of all the things that are distracting you, that are waste, that are not contributing to your goal, and start cutting them out. And then naturally you will have focus. You will have the time and the capacity and the decision making power to actually do what it takes to succeed. Right. Matter of fact, what I would recommend as well is you can get like your phone, set a reminder every 30, 60 minutes and then just get like a, you know, piece of paper, a pen and just start writing down like, you know, 7:00am this is what I did. And by the way, I'm using the Focus app here so you can do these crazy things as well once you get the basics sorted. But this isn't really going to help you much until you get the main stuff fixed, which is removing distractions. So back to what I was saying here. You write down, you know, 7:00am I did this. 7:30, I did this. 8:00am I did this. And you can do in a spreadsheet paper, doesn't matter. But bottom line, you'll be able to see patterns like where is your time being spent? You know, A lot of people feel busy, but they're really not productive. A lot of people feel like they're running out of time. But if they only took the time, maybe a day or at least a week to measure where their time is going, they would realize it's a lot of waste. You know, maybe you're trying to work or focus or read a book, but in between your check and email, you're looking at social media messages. I mean, it's a disaster. It's like a mental epidemic in the 21st century. People are very, very scattered and distracted. And I don't blame them. You know, it's the technology and a lot of other things going on as well. But how you fix it is you first get clear on your time inventory. You know, you do a simple exercise like this, you look at your week with hindsight, and you'll be able to see, okay, I'm wasting time on this and this and this. It's complete waste. And you'll be able to categorize your time. You can allocate it to things that bring you closer to your vision and things that take you away from it. And then simply how you can create that focus is you get rid of all the things that are taking you away from it. Now, of course, getting rid of it, elimination is one of the best things you can do. But if you can't eliminate it, then maybe limited, right? Maybe automate it, maybe delegate it, right? So there's multiple ways to do this, but the bottom line is very simple. Get clear on where your time is going. Categorize your time in hindsight, looking at what's contributing and what's detracting from your vision. And then lastly, get rid of the waste so that you can unlock focus automatically. And as a byproduct of removing waste and distractions. I hope this was helpful. This is Peter Sabo and Speak tomorrow.
