Pratique du shadowing : 17 Micro-Habits to Improve Your Focus
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- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the channel.0:00
- In this video, we're going to talk through 17 micro -habits that you can incorporate into your life to try and fix your attention span before it's too late and0:01
- the robots come for assault.0:09
- The first five minutes of any task are the ones where we are the most prone to getting distracted.0:10
- There's an absolute peak of this just before we start doing the task.0:14
- And then usually you find that about five minutes into the task, it's like, it's actually a lot easier to stay focused than you were at the start.0:17
- What that leads to is something really popular in the productivity space, the five -minute rule.0:22
- If you are struggling with staying focused on anything at all, just tell yourself you're going to do it for five minutes.0:26
- Or if you're in the middle of a focus session and you're finding yourself getting distracted, tell yourself, I'm just going to do it for another five minutes.0:31
- If you can sit through the discomfort of just doing it for five minutes, you'll usually find that it's a lot easier to stay focused and for your attention span0:37
- to stay on task with that particular thing.0:44
- Consume more long -form stuff.0:46
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- I'm not saying you have to cut out all forms of entertainment, but in general, the more you're consuming things that are longer form like books or audiobooks or movies,0:48
- rather than TikToks and Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.0:56
- The more you are able to train your attention span to focus on stuff for a little bit longer.0:58
- Get your phone away from the bedroom.1:03
- One of the biggest time sinks in the world is when we are scrolling on our phone for no reason at night time.1:05
- This is just terrible for our attention span, it's terrible for our focus, and it's also really terrible for our sleep and for our mood and for all of the1:10
- things in life.1:15
- So ideally, you'd be charging your phone not in your bedroom, and so you can say goodnight to your phone before you go to bed.1:16
- But if your phone absolutely has to be in your bedroom, it's worth setting up the charger across the bed so that you're not tempted to reach for it if1:21
- you can't get to sleep.1:27
- Set your phone to automatically block offending apps after a certain time at night.1:27
- I'm a big believer of building a system rather than requiring your own willpower to do sensible things like training up your attention span or training your ability to focus.1:32
- If you are watching a TV show or a movie, do it without reaching for your phone.1:39
- This is another example of being able to consume long form content, which is still entertainment in various ways, without having to do something else at the same time.1:43
- If you're watching a TV show or a movie, try watching it without the subtitles on.1:51
- I know, sometimes it's difficult to follow what's being said, and sometimes it is genuinely difficult to follow the plot to figure out, like, wait, who is that character again?1:54
- What did they actually want?2:00
- But by forcing yourself to watch stuff without the subtitles, you're actually training your attention span, which means you can get entertained and also be running this training program at2:01
- the same time.2:09
- Change up the environment in which you work.2:09
- Yes, it's all well and good having a nice productivity desk setup where you've got everything arranged as you like it.2:11
- But there's also something about being able to take your laptop into a very crowded, very busy coffee shop and training yourself to be able to focus in that particular2:17
- environment.2:23
- When I was at university, I found that in my first year of med school, I was only really able to focus when I was in my own room, but2:24
- then that would get kind of lonely.2:29
- And so from my second year onwards, I found that going to different libraries and different coffee shops, A, was way more enjoyable, which meant I just had a better2:30
- time.2:35
- But B, what it did was that it forced me to train my attention span and my focus so that I actually could focus in those coffee shops.2:36
- And especially if you're using stuff like noise -canceling headphones, this is really not as hard as it can sometimes appear.2:42
- And the benefit of this is that it means you can then train yourself to focus in almost any environment.2:46
- Oh, by the way, if you're interested, we actually have a completely free seven -day focus crash course, which is a free email course.2:50
- You just enter your email and then basically every day for seven days, you get some very detailed emails with some amazing strategies on how to improve your focus.2:55
- I'll be linked down below if you want to check it out.3:02
- Set screen time limits on your phone.3:04
- To be honest, a lot of the tips in this video are about the damn phone because the damn phone tends to be the thing that is stealing our attention3:06
- span more so than anything else.3:11
- And so all modern phones these days have built in screen time limits like limit yourself to Instagram for 10 minutes, 15 minutes.3:13
- And if you can do that, I can guarantee that your attention span is going to be way better compared to someone who's like got eight hours of screen time3:19
- on Instagram or on TikTok.3:24
- While you are trying to focus on something, get the phone away from you.3:25
- Ideally, you would have it in a different room altogether.3:28
- That would be the gold standard.3:31
- Silver standard would be that it's in the same room, but it's in some kind of do not disturb focus mode and it's like away from your desk.3:32
- And like bronze standard, which admittedly is the one that I do, is that you have it on some kind of do not disturb focus mode so you don't get3:37
- any notifications.3:42
- And you also have it turned face down so you're not like tempted to look at the phone.3:43
- Get good at understanding your internal triggers for distraction.3:47
- There is a wonderful book by my friend near EL called Indistractable, which is basically about how to take control of your attention span.3:50
- And the research that he summarizes in that book, what it basically suggests is that in around 80 % of cases, the key trigger for our distraction is not actually3:56
- something like an external notification, but it's actually some kind of internal emotional state that we are seeking to escape.4:03
- Something like boredom or something like anxiety or fear or insecurity or perfectionism.4:10
- And so we have those kind of feelings, those internal bodily sensations that come up as a result of us trying to do some work that might be tricky.4:14
- And instead of recognizing the feeling and sitting with the feeling and just sort of like experiencing the feeling, we feel so uncomfortable with what is just ultimately an internal4:21
- bodily sensation that's not really going to harm us, that we have to reach for the phone to try and distract us from that internal experience.4:29
- So if you recognize this and you actually want to train your attention span, one thing that's useful to do is when you feel that internal trigger, it's helpful to4:34
- take a step back and to try and name what emotion you're feeling.4:40
- Is it fear?4:43
- Is it uncertainty?4:44
- Is it doubt?4:45
- Is it anxiety?4:46
- Is it perfectionism?4:46
- Is it I'm afraid of what people think?4:48
- Like what's the thing?4:49
- And secondly, in that moment, if you close your eyes and you try and just really fully feel the feeling.4:50
- So rather than trying to escape the feeling of discomfort, actually what does it feel like if you just lean into that feeling of discomfort?4:55
- And usually you find, if you do that, that the feeling has not actually killed you.5:01
- It's actually not harmed you in any way at all.5:04
- And then the more practice you have of doing this thing where you recognize the emotion and allow yourself to fully feel it, the more it trains your brain and5:06
- your body to not try and run away from what might seem to be unpleasant emotions on the surface.5:12
- The more you can do that, the less likely you are to get distracted by stuff.5:17
- And therefore you have just trained your attention span to be able to focus for longer.5:20
- Now another way to increase your attention span is to minimize friction when you are doing deep work.5:23
- Now just like you, a lot of my work is done on the computer and one of my favorite ways of getting in the zone is to speak out my5:28
- ideas instead of typing them.5:33
- So there's an app that I've been using pretty much every day lately and that is WhisperFlow, who are very kindly sponsoring this video.5:35
- WhisperFlow is amazing.5:40
- You install it on your Mac and then you hit a keyboard shortcut and then you just speak whatever you want and it will do an amazing job of transcribing5:41
- the stuff that you've said and putting it into wherever you've got your cursor.5:47
- And it also adapts the tone and the formatting based on where you're writing.5:51
- So whatever I say then becomes either a casual message or a properly formatted email or a structured document depending on the context.5:54
- So for example, over the weekend I was working on some changes to the Lifestyle Business Academy curriculum, which is this online business school that we're working on.5:59
- But at the end of the day I was like, ah, I need to type out all of these different changes I've made so I can communicate them to the6:06
- team and to our students.6:10
- And so instead of having to like painstakingly type out everything and sort of format it and structure it appropriately, I just spoke out a spiel into WhisperFlow and it6:11
- did an amazing job of formatting things exactly how I wanted.6:18
- So in my case, all of my work is actually downstream of writing.6:21
- So ideas and courses and newsletters and YouTube videos and books.6:23
- And so having my thoughts recorded and accurately transcribed when I'm using my computer is a massive, massive unlock for me.6:26
- So if you're still manually typing things out, you might like to give WhisperFlow a go.6:31
- Head over to whisperflow .ai slash Ali and use the code Ali to get one month completely for free and that link will also be down in the video description.6:34
- So thank you again to Flow for sponsoring this video and let's get back into it.6:42
- Track your progress with whatever task you're doing.6:45
- Writers figured this out ages ago.6:48
- Almost every writer who writes for a living will find some kind of way of tracking their word count.6:49
- This is the principle that video game designers tap into as well.6:54
- Like whenever you're like killing the monsters in World of Warcraft or whatever, you can see your experience bar going up and you can see yourself leveling up.6:57
- And this is often what would make what is otherwise an a grindy, unenjoyable activity into something that feels genuinely good because we as humans are hardwired to seek progress.7:03
- When we can experience and feel ourselves making progress in whatever the thing is, even if it's something arbitrary, like killing a number of bears in World of Warcraft or7:12
- if you're a salesperson, like putting beads into a jar for every sales call you make, that feeling of progress is profoundly motivating to encourage us to continue doing the7:19
- thing and therefore as a result, by tracking your progress, you're actually improving your ability to focus on that task for longer.7:27
- Take recharging rather than stimulating breaks.7:33
- A lot of the time what I see in people who are working on starting businesses, for example, is that they'll work on the thing for, I don't know, 457:35
- minutes, 50 minutes, or an hour, and then they'll take a break.7:41
- But in that break, they will do something that is generating even more stimulation.7:44
- They will check their email.7:48
- They'll check their Slack messages.7:50
- They will look at social media and see what notifications came in.7:51
- Now, what that does is that it doesn't relax us, it does not recharge us, but what it does is it just adds more stuff to our mental to -do7:54
- list.7:59
- And this has the opposite effect of actually recharging us during a break.7:59
- So wherever possible, during the breaks that you are taking away from focusing, actually focus on things that genuinely recharge your energy rather than creating more open loops in your8:02
- mind.8:09
- Try to surround yourself with other people who are also trying to focus.8:10
- This is the incredible power of working in libraries or working in coffee shops where everyone's got the magbooks out and everyone seems to be working.8:13
- When you are in an environment where other people are working, it just naturally nudges you away from doing distracting things and actually towards working.8:18
- And the more you're able to do that, again, the more you are training your indestructibility, the more you're training your attention span, the more you're training your ability to8:25
- focus.8:32
- Diagnose and fix problems with your hardware.8:33
- Now, a lot of the times, something like attention span or focus, that's sort of like a software problem.8:35
- It's sort of like, you know, or at least we can conceptualize it as an issue with our brain, our brain's ability to focus.8:39
- But one thing that has a remarkable impact on your brain's ability to focus is, what are the stats of the rest of your body?8:45
- Have you slept appropriately well?8:50
- Have you eaten healthy food?8:52
- Have you exercised recently?8:53
- It's the boring stuff like that, the hardware problems that often end up fixing the software problems.8:55
- So if you're finding that you're having an issue with your attention span, honestly, the first thing to look at is, how's your sleep?8:59
- How's your nutrition?9:04
- How's your exercise?9:05
- Are you getting some basic level of socialization because we as humans need connection with other people?9:06
- And if you haven't ticked any of those boxes, you are leaving a lot of focus points on the table.9:10
- Turn off all of your notifications, other than the ones from friends and family.9:14
- We are constantly getting pinged by all of these apps that are just stealing our attention span.9:18
- And so what I find helpful is that any time I see a notification from an app that is not immediately actionable, or that's kind of annoying, I will just9:22
- long press and I will mute all notifications from the app.9:28
- With whatever you're doing, ask yourself the question, what would this look like if it were fun?9:31
- Generally, we struggle with our attention span and we struggle with our focus on things that we find boring.9:34
- But if you can find a way to make the task even just 10 % more enjoyable, you're a lot less likely to be distracted and you're also going to9:40
- be more productive, more creative and you'll have more energy to give to the other important areas of your life.9:45
- This is the exact thesis behind my New York Times bestselling book Feel Good Productivity.9:50
- If you haven't yet checked it out, or maybe if you have and you need some revision, there is a video over here that we've put together which is the9:54
- introduction to that book that explains the core fundamental thesis.9:59
- It explains the science behind why enjoyment is actually the secret to focus on productivity.10:02
- And there's a bunch of really cool animations in that video which is based on the first chapter of the audiobook that you can check out in that video right10:06
- over there.10:11
- So you should definitely check that out.10:12
- Thank you so much for watching and I will see you there.10:13
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