4 Strategies to Boost Productivity and Focus
17 Nov 2023 · 8 min
In this episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast, host Rob Dial explains why improving productivity and focus matters, then outlines four concrete strategies to achieve higher output: (1) Master single‑tasking, emphasizing the Pomodoro technique and the cognitive costs of multitasking, supported by research such as the 2008 "Is Multitasking a Myth?" study; (2) Practice deep work, drawing on Cal Newport’s concepts, creating sacred time blocks, rituals (coffee, music, candles) and aligning them with personal energy peaks; (3) Optimize your physical environment by reducing visual and auditory clutter, using noise‑cancelling headphones, strategic lighting, and clear signals to others that you are in focus mode; (4) Batch similar tasks together to minimize context‑switching, applying the approach to podcast production, email handling, content creation, and other recurring activities. Throughout, Rob intersperses motivational calls‑to‑action, sponsor messages, and reminders to join his weekly inspirational text group. The episode ends with a recap of the four strategies and an encouragement to share the episode and improve others’ days.
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Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. And if you want to join my weekly Inspiration text message group, if you live in the United States or Canada, you can join it. It is 512-580-9305. If you send me a text message to 512-580-9305, you will automatically be linked up for my video and text messages that come through to your phone. Today we're going to be talking about four strategies to better improve your productivity and your focus. And why would you want to improve your productivity and your focus? Because the way that I think about it is I want to be as efficient as I possibly can with every single minute that I put into something. I want my output to be the best possible output that it can be for every minute of input that I put in. And all too often we look at an eight hour day. We work for eight hours and we might get like an hour 90 minutes of like really great work out of it. But when you look at someone who has a whole lot of focus and really high productivity, they can get six to seven hours out of really an eight hour day. And so when you look at it, what I would be thinking in my mind is if the Average person is getting like an hour, and someone that's highly productive is getting six or seven hours. They're basically getting an entire week done in one day compared to what the average person with not really great focus or productivity has. And so I'm going to give you six strategies to really help you get better at that. Strategy number one is to master the art of single tasking and understanding what single tasking is. Single tasking is obviously the opposite of multitasking, which means focusing on one task and one task only. And cognitive psychology tells us that the brain does not really perform well when it is scattered over several different tasks. And so single tasking allows you to be better and to be better, number one, but to be better concentrated on what it is that you're working towards to get into a flow while you're doing that one thing, which will then in the long term lead to higher quality work, whatever that work is that you're trying to do. What it also does, though, it also reduces the cognitive load and mental fatigue that is associated when you're constantly shifting your attention. Because if you work in an office, let's say you have an office and there's other desks around you and you're trying to get something done, you are constantly bombarded with other things that people need from you. They might want to come up and talk to you, whatever it might be. You need to figure out a way to take your brain and say, hey, I'm going to get the whole entire world out of this brain. I'm going to focus on this one thing. I'm not going to do two things at once. I'm going to do one thing at a time. And there's actually a study, there's actually many studies as I was researching this, on how multitasking is terrible for you to do. Like you will be less productive if you decide to be a multitasker. There's actually a study that was done in, in 2008, and it's called Is Multitasking a Myth? And the study showed through human MRIs, it showed that when the brain is overloaded with tasks, when it has multiple tasks it needs to work on, it resulted in reduced efficiency and effective effectiveness when performing those tasks. And the research indicated that the brain's frontal lobe becomes activated during multitasking, which is associated with the declining cognitive performance due to overloading the human's working memory. And so there's study after study after study after study that shows you that multitasking actually produces worse work. So what I want to do. And what I think everybody should start doing is if I'm gonna be working on something, I'm gonna be working on one thing and one thing only. The thing is to immerse yourself. Bring all of your brain power to that one task and think about it like it really makes sense, doesn't it? Would you wanna bring 20% of your brain power to the tasks that you're working on, or would you rather put a hundred percent of your brain power? If you could put a hundred percent of your brain power into it, you're gonna get it done quicker, obviously, and you're obviously going to get much better work done. Done. And so really what it comes down to is looking at your to do list every single day and seeing, okay, I've got 17 things on my to do list and prioritizing my tasks. Identify what the most critical tasks are that you have throughout the day and then allocate your best, most uninterrupted time to that thing. And if you've been listening to this podcast before, you've heard me say it over and over and over again, simply because I have never found anything else that works better than this is to use the Pomodoro technique, which means you do one thing and one thing only for 25 minutes and then you take five minutes off. 25 minutes, five minutes off. If you want to hear on how to get better with the Pomodoro technique, you can go back and listen to previous episodes. I've talked about it many times of how to actually master the pomodoro technique. I actually talk about in my book to level up, where I actually talk about how to get good at the pomodoro technique and then how to expand yourself from 25 minutes of working time up to 45 minutes of working time. So that's the first thing. Master single tasking strategy number two, which goes along with this and all these kind of flow into each other is to use something called deep work. There's a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport, and in his book he talks about, he defines deep work as professional activities performed in a state of distraction, free concentration that pushes your cognitive abilities, cognitive capabilities to their limit. And so what you want to do is you want to have time throughout your day, whatever it is, whether it's an hour or three hours, and you protect that time every single day. And you say, this is the time of the day that I'm going to do my deep work. And deep work really means what you would think. Where you go really deep on that one thing. And so instead of having really what he calls shallow work, which is what most people tend to do throughout the day, which is you're doing a little bit of this, a little bit of
that, a little bit of this, a
little bit that is that you're going to go really deep on just that one thing and you're going to protect that time as if it's sacred because cognitively it is kind of sacred. It's, it's where you're saying from from 11am to 1pm I'm going to do deep work. And then each day you decide what are the things that you're going to do in that deep work time, and you create a ritual around it and you do the same thing to prep, to go into it, like get coffee, prep your workspace, which I'll talk about in a minute. Put some music on, light a candle.
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burn incense. Whatever it is you need to do, where it's like you're making it a ritual of like this is important and I'm going to work and work really hard for the next two hours and you protect that time. That's what deep work is used for. And deep work allows you to produce better results in a much shorter period of time. You know, I'll take the entire book of Cal Deep Work by Cal Newport and tell you that throughout his entire book, he says if you have a sacred time that you protect where you go deep on really one thing, study after study after study shows that that time is going to produce the best output for you. So you want to have a time where you can have much better results in a much shorter period of time. And so you don't have to have deep work for eight hours in a day. There's shallow work that you need to do. Like for me, there's some deep work that I need to do when I'm prepping for these podcast episodes and I put on my headphones and I cra. I crank out the script for all these podcast episodes and put the bullet points down and do all of the research. But then there's times throughout today, like I have a zoom call later on that would be considered shallow work for me. So what is the deep work? The things that you need to bring the best of your brain to and you want to maximize your performance here because all too often we're so distracted and only giving 40 or 50% of our brain power at most to a task. And so here's what you're really going to do is you're going to dedicate specific blocks of time every single day for deep work. And this is like non negotiable. You have to do this every single day. I recommend doing it when you know that you have the most energy in the day. For me, I know that I have the most energy in the day between about 11am and 2pm and so that is when I always get my deep work done. That is when I plan podcast episodes. That is usually when I record podcast episodes. It's 1:50 right now. So I feel like my brain is at its best in these moments. So I'm going to do my most important work in those moments. And so that's when you feel like your brain is on the most. So start paying attention to when you have the most energy, when you feel like you're in flow. You know, if it's 1pm for you, we'll do 1pm to 3pm, whatever it might be. Try to get two hours of just really deep work every single day. And the thing that you want to do is you want to embrace the struggle. You want to train your brain to embrace the struggle of trying to focus rather than seeking distractions. Because it's really essential for making sure that your mind goes into a deep state of work. Because the more that you do it, the better you become at it. So you might not be really good at focusing, you not may not really be good at, at not wanting to be distracted in your first few times of doing deep work, but you get better at it because maybe you just have a really strong distraction muscle and a really weak focus muscle. And you just need to work on, on weakening the distraction muscle and strengthening the focus muscle. So that's number two is to make sure that you use deep work Strategy number three is to optimize your environment. You want to try to create an environment where taking action towards whatever goal is that you're working towards is easy and distracting yourself is hard. So how can you create an environment where taking action is easy and distraction is hard and environmental psychology shows that your physical space will Influence the way that you feel, the way that you think, and the way that you behave. So how can you create an environment that feels good for you? For some people listening to this podcast, it might be nothing on a desk, in a computer. For some people, it might be sitting outside at a coffee shop. For some people, it might be sitting at a desk that has a bunch of plants around you and you might have right by a window, so it's really bright light coming in. What you want to figure out is what's best for you, what inspires you to take action, and you want to find a quiet and comfortable place where you can work and not be disturbed. Then you can use noise canceling headphones. That's what I recommend. I always have my noise canceling headphones, headphones with me when I'm working. Um, so that you can get deeper into your own concentration. You want to be able to clear your area because you want to try to control as much visual clutter as possible. Uh, because visual clutter actually competes for your attention and can lead to more cognitive overload, which will get in the way of your focus. You want to take your phone, put your phone away. If you're working from a coffee shop or something, make sure your phone isn't out in front of you. Put it inside of your bag. Uh, for me, I always have to keep my phone completely out of eyesight. And I usually, if I'm being honest with you, I'm working at home. What I do is I actually take it and put in my kitchen drawer. If I'm working from the office, I'll always take it and I'll put it inside of my backpack so that I can't see it. And so, you know, what's another thing you can do to help you with your environment? Put a sign on your office door. Close your office door. If you don't have an office and you work inside of a cubicle telling people, hey, I'm about to do some really deep work. Can you not bother me? And then taking a sign and putting a sign on the outside of your cubicle, it says, don't bother me unless it's an emergency. I have one of my listeners tells me when he does his deep work, he sent me a message one time where he actually puts a piece of paper and tapes it to his back that says, don't bother me unless it's an emergency. And so it's like, how can you create the environment that is best for you? Because what's best for me and what's Best for all the other listeners might not be the same. That's best for you. So what would the perfect environment look like? And you start thinking about this, like, are you constantly interrupted by colleagues? Or are you constantly interrupted by your kids coming in and needing something from you? Do you have all of the tools that you need to be able to get work done within arm's reach? Is there enough light in your space? And you just want to start thinking about, like, small tweaks like positioning your desk and taking your desk and putting it closer to a window so that you get bright light that comes in, because bright light coming from the sun comes through your eyes and tells your brain to be more alert and more focused. So what can you do to create the perfect working environment for you is something to think about. So that's strategy number three, and strategy number four is to try to take something that you do multiple times throughout the week and try to get it all done in one time. So it's called batching your tasks. So you want to try to batch all of your tasks. Uh, when I first started this podcast, I, you know, it came out Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Now it comes out Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But when it was Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I would literally record, plan, and record the day before, and then I would put the episode out. I'm planning, record, and the day before and put out. So I would plan and record it three separate times throughout the week. And that just really didn't work for me. And I did it for years, though. And then what I started doing is I saying, well, hey, if I'm gonna get my brain into the flow of being creative and doing research and planning all of this stuff out, why don't I just try to do all of them at once? And so for me, because we do four episodes now, I'll plan and research two episodes, and then I'll record two episodes, and then I'll plan and record two episodes, and I'll do it two days in a row. So it's usually Wednesdays and Thursdays we record them. And so I do this with podcasts, I do this with recording in creating content for Instagram, where instead of thinking, oh, I need to create something for Instagram and for TikTok today, I just do it all in one run. Just makes it easier to batch all of your tasks. So how could you use this? You know, if you do emails, why don't you do emails when you first get into the office and you get them all done in the morning, and then you do emails an hour before you leave. So instead of checking your emails 42 times a day, which is I think what the average is, it's like 30 to 40 times a day, people check their email, which is insane. Why don't you check your email in the morning if you can do this? Obviously check it in the morning, get all of your emails cleared out, and then an hour before you have to leave, do the exact same thing, get all of them cleared out, and then the rest of your day, you can do other stuff, whatever it is that you need to do. You know, if you're working on a presentation, you could, if you wanted to, if you have a presentation due next week, you could take a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, a little bit the next day. Or you could say, like, hey, I'm going to dedicate the entire day to presentation day. So I'm gonna get it all done in one day. I'm gonna get myself in the flow. I'm gonna get myself in the energy of this presentation, and I'm gonna try to crank all of it out today. And you might get part of it done this morning, part of it done in around noon, part of it done in the afternoon, part of it done in the evening. But really, like, if your brain is in flow on that one thing, whether it's creating a presentation or going through emails or creating content, or for me, doing podcast episodes, if your brain is in that flow, why would you want it to be in the flow and then switch it to something else? Because when you switch to something else, there's an actual cognitive decline that goes from switching from one thing to another. What I would rather do is say, hey, my brain is on this thing and it's working pretty well right now. How do I just keep it on the exact same task? And so, see, if there's some tasks that you do multiple times throughout the week, and just ask yourself, instead of doing this thing three times a week, could I just do it once a week, but do it for three hours? Usually when you do this, you actually end up getting much better output and much better work done, and you get it done faster because you're already in the flow. There's no cognitive decline from switching from one task to another because you're already on this task. And so it just makes a lot more sense the way when you look at the human brain and how it actually works for you to be more productive and be more focused for you to batch all of your tasks that you can possibly batch. So those are the four strategies to be able to get better focus and productivity. Number one is to master the art of single tasking. Number two, use deep work. Number three, optimize your environment. Number four, batch as many tasks as you possibly can. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it with a friend. And once again, as you heard me say just a little while ago, if you want to join my weekly inspirational text in the United States and Canada, you can text me right now. 512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. I'll send text messages, videos to you, all that stuff at different points throughout the week. So with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.
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