Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus
& Sharpen Your Creative Mind
Chapter 2: Finding Focus in a Distracted World
Jocelyn K. Glei
In this chapter of “Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind,” I read about how to find focus amidst all of the distractions that we have in our world today and more importantly how to hone my attention to produce work that really matters.
In the past few decades that I have grown up, the amount of information that we are confronted with on a daily basis has grown exponentially. “Open-plan offices have brought the buzz of other people’s activities into our workspaces. The Internet has provided an infinite source of distraction right inside our primary workstation—the computer. And smartphones have made the allure of new information available anytime, anywhere” (Glei 69).
I find this problem to be totally apparent in my every day life as well. Every time that I am on the computer trying to get a project done, create design work, or work on a paper, for example, I time and time again find myself procrastinating on Facebook scrolling through some girl who I haven’t talked to in year’s family vacation albums or scrolling through endless addicting BuzzFeed posts on cute goats. It is a real problem! Also, my mom told me last month that we are now known as “the generation in their palms,” referring to the fact that we cannot keep our heads out of our palms, constantly checking our smartphones and never bothering to look away and notice what is going on in the real world. We never bother to stop for a second, take a breath, and actually see the leaves growing on the trees! I constantly am caught up in other people’s lives or posts, games, pictures, articles, etc. that I have found that are totally irrelevant to me. The entire point of the invention of these apps or websites is to get people addicted to them and in hopes that they will spend and rack up countless hours a day on their platform. It is all a trap that I have completely fallen for.
Yet today in our society, and especially in the design world, you are sort of required to keep up on all portals of the internet, be on top of your social media game, and know how the design world and its technology is constantly changing. If you look away for too long, you will feel totally out of the loop. In fact at my internship this summer on the Social Media team at an advertising agency, it was part of your job to constantly patrol social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google +, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. Up until then, I had never even created a Pinterest account because I just knew that I would become addicted to it and spend countless hours procrastinating on the platform instead of doing something productive. However, at this internship they made me make an account so I could surf and explore the different pages and see what was trending so I could help come up with ideas of how to better brand and sell our accounts on these platforms. In the end, I discovered that Pinterest, for example, was actually an awesome tool when it comes to designing and advertising your brand. Yes, some time on this platform may be used procrastinating, but I actually find that I spent a lot of the time on this platform well spent by researching and finding inspiration from other users.
So obviously, I need some help. In this chapter I learned how “amid this constant surge of information, attention has become our most precious asset. To spend it wisely, we must develop a better understanding of how temptation works on our brains, cultivate new strategies for enhancing our self-control, and carve out time to truly focus on big, creative tasks (69).
The key takeaways from this chapter were to defend your creative time, focus when you’re fresh, kill the background noise (by turning off your phone, email, and any apps unrelated to your task!), make progress visible, give your brain a break, and tap into transitional moments. “Take a break from checking your smartphone during transitional moments, and open yourself up to opportunity and serendipity” (116).
“In a world filled with distraction, attention is our competitive advantage. Look at each day as a challenge—and an opportunity—to keep your eye on the prize” (69).
In this chapter of “Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind,” I read about how to find focus amidst all of the distractions that we have in our world today and more importantly how to hone my attention to produce work that really matters.
In the past few decades that I have grown up, the amount of information that we are confronted with on a daily basis has grown exponentially. “Open-plan offices have brought the buzz of other people’s activities into our workspaces. The Internet has provided an infinite source of distraction right inside our primary workstation—the computer. And smartphones have made the allure of new information available anytime, anywhere” (Glei 69).
I find this problem to be totally apparent in my every day life as well. Every time that I am on the computer trying to get a project done, create design work, or work on a paper, for example, I time and time again find myself procrastinating on Facebook scrolling through some girl who I haven’t talked to in year’s family vacation albums or scrolling through endless addicting BuzzFeed posts on cute goats. It is a real problem! Also, my mom told me last month that we are now known as “the generation in their palms,” referring to the fact that we cannot keep our heads out of our palms, constantly checking our smartphones and never bothering to look away and notice what is going on in the real world. We never bother to stop for a second, take a breath, and actually see the leaves growing on the trees! I constantly am caught up in other people’s lives or posts, games, pictures, articles, etc. that I have found that are totally irrelevant to me. The entire point of the invention of these apps or websites is to get people addicted to them and in hopes that they will spend and rack up countless hours a day on their platform. It is all a trap that I have completely fallen for.
Yet today in our society, and especially in the design world, you are sort of required to keep up on all portals of the internet, be on top of your social media game, and know how the design world and its technology is constantly changing. If you look away for too long, you will feel totally out of the loop. In fact at my internship this summer on the Social Media team at an advertising agency, it was part of your job to constantly patrol social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google +, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. Up until then, I had never even created a Pinterest account because I just knew that I would become addicted to it and spend countless hours procrastinating on the platform instead of doing something productive. However, at this internship they made me make an account so I could surf and explore the different pages and see what was trending so I could help come up with ideas of how to better brand and sell our accounts on these platforms. In the end, I discovered that Pinterest, for example, was actually an awesome tool when it comes to designing and advertising your brand. Yes, some time on this platform may be used procrastinating, but I actually find that I spent a lot of the time on this platform well spent by researching and finding inspiration from other users.
So obviously, I need some help. In this chapter I learned how “amid this constant surge of information, attention has become our most precious asset. To spend it wisely, we must develop a better understanding of how temptation works on our brains, cultivate new strategies for enhancing our self-control, and carve out time to truly focus on big, creative tasks (69).
The key takeaways from this chapter were to defend your creative time, focus when you’re fresh, kill the background noise (by turning off your phone, email, and any apps unrelated to your task!), make progress visible, give your brain a break, and tap into transitional moments. “Take a break from checking your smartphone during transitional moments, and open yourself up to opportunity and serendipity” (116).
“In a world filled with distraction, attention is our competitive advantage. Look at each day as a challenge—and an opportunity—to keep your eye on the prize” (69).
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