Wake up insanely early in the morning
Ask HN: How do you focus?
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#22No social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I think that's at least half the battle. Good advice from YuriNiyazov too. "If I'm having a day where I am not getting much done, I stop trying.". I think it's important to pick your battles. You won't be productive 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Word on the social media. I got rid of my Facebook in college and my average productivity instantly skyrocketed (although that creeping desire to waste time eventually gets filled with other things, like online chess).
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#23My main distraction is noise, since I mostly work from home, and my home can be a rather noisy place sometimes (I don't live alone). The sound of the TV, for instance, can be anywhere from a nice background presence (like for a documentary) to an impossibility to work (like an action movie that tries very hard to catch your attention).
But one day, I tried this, and boy did it change my life! http://simplynoise.com/
I'm pretty sure this doesn't work for everyone and can get annoying to some people; but for me it was a revelation and solved a problem for good.
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#24I change jobs. I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account. The televisions were trashed over a decade ago. My home page is my personal KanbanFlow page, modified to follow Mark Forster's Final System. It almost works.
I make sure not to overcommit myself. A study shows that scheduling has to be considered independently of effort, ability and experience. If I am not doing what I think I should be doing, I try to change the environment so that not doing what I should be doing is harder than doing what I should be doing. I don't believe that the exercise of willpower is any kind of solution. Its usefulness is limited largely to the minimum expenditure necessary to operate within the environment one designs to encourage work.
Also, I try to operate on a long time horizon. If something I do isn't going to have a discernible impact 10,000 years from now, I consider whether the opportunity cost is too high.
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#25DragonForce at full blast.
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#26Set a goal to do one small part of it in 5-10 minutes, then the rest usually follows. If it's a real struggle to get that small part done, examine why I 'need' to get it done in the first place. Deadlines are a huge motivator; I find external ones if the task doesn't come with its own.
Also, making tea or a latte before getting down to work can help me focus my mind, over time I've come to associate both of those activities with 'focus time'.
Edit to add: Isolating the task from distractions kind of goes without saying, but I find it helps to frame the distractions as much as the task. Why am I so compelled to go play game X, or read book Y, instead of the task at hand? Going a level deeper and figuring out what your brain's avoiding/being lured by has been really useful for me (especially while dealing with focus issues after a concussion).
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#27Stop trying to focus. Just do, or don't.
It may sound as silly advice; but it's the honest truth. The very fact that you are thinking about focusing when you are trying to focus; precludes you from actually doing it.
It's counter intuitive: Sit behind the work to be done, and truly accept whatever happens. Accept the fact that you might be unfocused or distracted. It's a sign that you aren't ready to work. Don't resist. Just either do, or don't.
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#28If I'm having a day where I am not getting much done, I stop trying. I close and leave the laptop and my phone at my desk, take a notebook and a pen, and go to the local library, where I sit down and write for an hour or two a discussion of why I am not getting anything done, and what I can do about it. The next time this happens again, I repeat the process, except I also reread the entry (yes, you need to keep the j…
i was working, then i saw this post...
I had, literally, just hit "close" on the browser window when I saw it and re-opened to read.
Sigh.
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#29I find that playing a musical instrument helps calm the mind.
Re: Ask HN: How do you focus?
#30I change jobs. I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account. The televisions were trashed over a decade ago. My home page is my personal KanbanFlow page, modified to follow Mark Forster's Final System. It almost works. I make sure not to overcommit myself. A study shows that scheduling has to be considered independently of effort, ability and experience. If I am not doing what I think I should be doing, I try to change…
If something I do isn't going to have a discernible impact 10,000 years from now, I consider whether the opportunity cost is too high.
I'd be really curious as to what crosses that threshold, and how you determine this.
I also find it a very interesting viewpoint in light of the famous JM Keynes quote, which I've only just encountered in a longer form:
But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
h/t: /u/wumbotarian on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1tzb9c/10_quotes_...