There is high demand on your focus in today’s digital world. You need to make sure to be in charge of it, otherwise someone else will be.

1. Switch off your notifications

   Notifications are everywhere. In fact, an average smartphone user gets 63,5 notifications everyday. Isn’t that crazy? The math here is easy, notifications may be useful but not to the current extend. Notifications interrupts your work several times a day and forces you to switch focus in the blink of an eye. After a notification has forced us to switch focus, it can take us about 23 minutes to get back to what you were doing, this according to a study from University of California, Irvine.

   Needless to say – If you need to get sh*t done, go switch those notifications off right away!

2. Only allow meetings on specific days

   Maybe you’ve heard of “meeting free days” or “do not disturb days”?
   Big companies like Facebook and Asana has a company-policy called “no meeting Wednesdays”. This means that they never schedule a meeting during Wednesdays, which allows the team to have at least one day a week available for deep work. Getting back into the groove of what you were doing before a meeting takes valuable time, so imagine how much time that gets lost when a day contains several meetings.

3. Write down what you need to get done

   A good old to-do list is a perfect way to get an overview of what you need to get done. Writing down your to-dos can lower stress and make you feel that you are in control of the situation.

   1. Write down your to-do’s
   2. Prioritize
   3. Get it done
   4. Mark your to-do as done

   Step 4 is important! Marking your to-dos as “done” will boost the feeling of being productive and that you’re getting things done, this will help motivate you to get the next thing done.
   Make sure to be digital, use your CRM to schedule to-do’s in you calendar, that way your colleagues will know when you are busy being productive 😊

4. Stop multitasking

   Studies have shown that multitasking decreases our productivity and instead leads us to feeling stressed and less motivated. Our brains are not designed to multitask, hence you’ll never be fully focused on anything. This means that the risk of making mistakes will be higher and it may lead to lower quality of your work. Multitasking is especially bad if you’re in a profession which requires you the be creative. Creativity requires focus and being present, and multitasking will not give you any of that.

5. Use time management techniques like “Timeboxing”

   This is a technique used by successful leaders like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Timeboxing your day means that your break down your day in timeboxes, not allowing each task to take longer than the time you have set aside for it. We all know that work tends to expand to fill the time available for its completion.
   For example, you have probably been feeling stressed the day before a deadline some time, no matter if you’ve had 3 months to do the work or 3 days. Why? Because work tends to expand to fill the time available for its completion. Timeboxing and timeblocking are well used techniques in software development and project management but can be applied for anyone. Great tasks to use this technique for is tasks you lack motivation for or tasks that often take too long.