Once you’ve finished properly preparing your body, the next step is to ensure that your mind remains focused on your work and doesn’t get distracted.
Prepare Your Mind – Eliminate Distractions
- Never start working without first knowing what you want to accomplish.
- Focus on one task at a time.
- Clear out your workspace, both digitally and physically.
- Set aside a specific amount of time for a given session.
For each work session always try to have at least one set, concrete goal. For larger tasks, try and break it down into smaller, well-defined chunks and work on one chunk at a time.
Studies show that multitasking leads to reduced efficiency. Every time you switch between tasks, your mind goes through the stages of goal shifting (changing what you want to accomplish at that instant) and rule activation (changing the set of mental structures required to perform each individual task). Each switch takes a distinct amount of time that can quickly build up when constantly going back and forth between tasks.
Another ramification here is that, before starting to work, you should always
Remove all non-work-related distractions or activities from the picture. This means silencing your cell phone, disconnecting from chatting programs, and closing all webpages or programs non-essential to the current work at hand.
Similarly, if you sit down to work at a table that is covered in empty food containers, papers, or any other bunch of random clutter this actually reduces your work efficiency. The more items in your field of view that your brain has to process the harder it is to focus on the task at hand. A clean environment is also mentally associated with ‘getting things done’ just because cleaning itself is so often procrastinated that just being in a clean room makes you think that you’ve already started working.
Use a timer.
If you have a large, indefinite amount of time to accomplish a task it is often difficult to really get into the flow of working on it. It becomes easy to let yourself get distracted. This is generally what happens when people “pull all-nighters.” They viewed staying up all night as an option and therefore failed to work efficiently from the start. If instead you set a smaller, specified amount of time to work with and a clear goal for what to accomplish you will find yourself moving through tasks at a very satisfying rate.