How distracted are you really?

Hugh MacLeod

We give ourselves too much credit for being focussed. It takes about 24 minutes to refocus on the taks in hamd after an interruption. (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact) according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine. (23 Jul 2015).

Most of us have the attention span of a fly (if there’s even such a thing) and the concentration of a goldfish. I’m not trying to be rude to the fly and the goldfish, I’m merely trying to remind ourselves that we are so easily distracted these days that we are losing the art of being mindful.

So now you know why ‘Mindfulness’ is getting so much traction these days, most of us are actually realising that we need to re-program our brains to be more mindful, because we’ve lost the art of it.

I went to the Opticians, recently for my 2-yearly eyetest. Good news by the way, my left eye has improved eyesight. Yes it does happen, my wife and eye set an intention years ago that our eyesights would improve and they are actually improving year on year. True story.

Anyway, I was asked to sit in the waiting room and there wasn’t anyone there. Few magazines and newspapers on a table, out of date of course and posters on the wall, advertising stuff and a few people concentrating on their work. I decided to watch this one person who was fixing a pair of eyeglasses working with full concentration on fixing it. It was a marvel to watch her human mind trying to organise parts, screwdrivers and hand movements to remove screws from the eyeglasses, replacing them and getting the lenses back in. So interesting to watch.

Had I sat down and got my phone out, I would have missed all that.

Then a young couple walked in and sat down on the chairs beside me. First thing the male did was get out his phone and started looking at it. He needed the distraction of his phone to allow him to pass time I guess.

So sad to witness.

Whilst driving to the Opticians I ended up in stationary traffic. There was along quque and I noticed a woman behind me in her car with her head down. Ever so often she would look up in a panic, to make sure she didn’t miss the traffic moving on. She did this at least 6 times. It was so obvious that she was looking at her phone and probably texting on it.

Happy mobile watching!

Michael de Groot

Simplify

There are so many ways to communicate with people via the web these days, that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to decide which method to use.

Most of our contacts are in at least 3 different locations. Probably Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Then there’s also Instagram and Snapchat. That last one depends on how old you are, so forget that one for the purpose of this article.

Do you send them a) an old-fashioned text message b) a Facebook messenger c) direct message them on twitter or message them on LinkedIn. Not sure we do many on instagram at all, I’m just the wrong age group.

Well it all depends if you have their phone number or not.

So here’s my approach these days.

a) if I have their number and they are in the UK, send them a text message. It’s likely that this service is always left on in terms of notifications.
b) if you don’t have their number and you are connected on LinkedIn, message them there. The chances are that they haven’t switched off notifications for that. 
c) failing that use normal email or phone/Skype them!

It still doesn’t sound simple does it.

To be honest all I want is a simple life and all those social networks have made it increasingly cumbersome and not efficient. Remember when they said that technology would make our life’s simpler and we would be able to spend more time with our families and friends? Well the opposite has actually happened. If you haven’t already lost your teenage son in his online gaming and your teenage daughter in snapchat world then you probably will lose them in a different platform that hasn’t been invented yet.

Happy communicating!

Michael de Groot

Chronotype

Daniel Pink has a new book: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

I watched his RSA talk on YouTube, where he explained why timing for us humans matters.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbicgT4KrWc[/embed]

He mentioned some studies that analysed words from a large set of date using LIWC. The way that the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program works is fairly simple. Basically, it reads a given text and counts the percentage of words that reflect different emotions, thinking styles, social concerns, and even parts of speech.

One of those studies they analysed 500 million tweets over 2.4 million users in 84 countries to learn about their emotional content. What was very evident that the mood of the tweets vary across the time of day. Better at the start, then it dipped (the trough) and then recovered by the end of the day.

His premise after a number of other studies, like investor earning calls, students pass rates at exams, is that we all perform differently depending the time of day.

He suggest we can all work out our chronotype by calculating when we go to bed and when we get up during a non-working day, he calls it ‘free day’. Determine the mid point of the no of hours sleep and if it’s before 3.30am we are a lark and after 5.30am we are an owl. Anything else, we are a 3rd bird.

Do your deep thinking work at your best time, your admin in the trough and have insights late in the evening.

Guess what time I’m writing this on a train back from Birmingham? 10pm! It’s remarkable easy to write at this time.

Happy sleeping!

Michael de Groot

Priority

During my first Minimalist meet up the other day, the one attendee explained to me that productivity is a major issue for most people. The main reason being that there’s is so much distraction.

Whatever you are doing right now and hopefully that’s reading this article, that is your priority.

A priority for me is something that I have decided that I will be doing next for however long it takes to complete it. So for me that’s writing this article. I decided before I started that this would be my next priority. It helps that I’m on a train into Birmingham at the moment with very little to do and the decision was to either read something, waste time on social media or write about something I had learnt from a fellow minimalist. So I decided to write and allow this to be shared with others.

When you are spending time on Facebook then in that moment you’ve decided that this is your priority for however long you spend on it, which very likely will be quite a while.

There might be a dozen other things that need to be done in that moment, clearing out that cupboard, tidying up your clothing, changing the bed and many more tasks that will have to wait, because it’s not a priority.

Happy choosing!

Michael de Groot

Right then, what's actually causing you to be so distracted?

@LinkedIn & @gapingvoid

I'm sure you have heard that little voice in your head, you know the one that tells you that you should have done something when you haven't, the one that NEVER shuts up.  Oh and it's never positive, it's ALWAYS a negative commentary.

Well it's the same one that talks to you when you are writing, posting, liking and commenting. Constantly evaluating what you're writing, questioning whether you should have done it differently, said more or said less and even if you should have said anything at all.

Should you tap the like or the love emoji on Facebook and tapping the angry one when someone is complaining or the sad one when they're sharing some personal heartache. Is tapping the emoji enough or do you add some comments too. But what if you say the wrong thing. You’ve only got 10 seconds to add something.  Look at all those other comments, should you even bother or should you just like one of the other comments you agree with, but oh some of those other comments are dreadful, should you say something back or should you just move on. But you may be enraged with it all and your inner dragon can't resist it.

All of those voices are happening instantly and in split-second succession and you don't even know it's happening to you. And it's very likely that you were being distracted by the next post,  the next notification on your mobile and your need to write and post the next article or blogpost.

We are convinced that the distractions are outside of us and in fact they are all in our heads. We are the ones who allow ourselves to be distracted, it's never anyone else’s fault, really it isn't.

So how do you manage to stay focussed and on topic with all the thousands of opportunities for distraction?

BETTER HABITS

You are never going to drown out all those distractions but you can train yourself to develop better habits.

Better habits means getting organised around when, where and how you engage with all of the thousands of distractions that you have to face and all the tasks you have to perform. It means being organised and you decide when you allow yourself to be distracted.

Examples:

1. Notification to say someone's tagged you? You schedule a reminder when you know you have time to look at notifications.
2. You need to write an article or blogpost? Again schedule a reminder and block time in your schedule when you will have time to write it.
3. Ideally you'd like to have a steady flow of posts going out to your social channels. Use a social media scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite and there are other schedulers too.
4. You need a source of interesting and exciting content to learn from and to repost to demonstrate your thought leadership. Investigate using RSS aggregators, like Feedly, Flipboard and others.

I have found by using the Apple reminders app and scheduling the reminder for specific days and times I am able to be far more productive and disciplined in developing better habits. It's an ongoing journey and with practice you can and will develop a better habit in reducing the amount of unnecessary distractions.

I can highly recommend The Habit Guide by Leo Babauta, who has some excellent tips and strategies to develop better habits. He also writes a great blog zenhabits.net.

What strategies have you developed for reducing the amount of distractions?

I'd love to learn and I am sure others would to, so help us out and share your answer below.

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LinkedIn created a brilliant eBook with my favourite illustrator. @gapingvoid (Hugh Macleod) creates the most amazing messages through his illustrations. Read more about him and @gapingvoid here: (http://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/team-members/hugh-macleod/)

Regularly I will share one of the articles and illustrations from the eBook and give you my opinion, interpretation, insight and my meaning.

@stayingaliveuk 🚀

#contentmarketing #content #socialmedia #engagement #marketing #socialselling #sales #empathy

Online is great and talking is even better. Everyone's ultimate goal in business and life is to make real connections, where you meet someone face to face. Before that meeting a conversation is the ultimate icebreaker. I value my LinkedIn connections and realise that I don't really know you or what your goals are and how I might facilitate or support those goals. Feel free to click through and book a call with me (https://www.stayingaliveuk.com/discovery-call/). I have blocked out only Fridays each week, excluding holidays, for calls. Hope to speak with you soon.