Narrow Your Vision

20 points•1 comment•submitted by AFriendlyTitan to r/FriendlyTitan

What do you have on your mental “daily planner” for the day? What tasks do you have in mind?

What’s tragic is that social media has somehow made “doing more things” the same as “being productive.”

For example, if your goal is to improve: your sense of fashion, exploring new things, and catching up with modern culture, and pursuing your passion, the answer is never to do everything a little bit every day.

Sure, you can say to yourself and others “Oh I did a,b,x,y, AND z today” and feel good about what you tell yourself. Or you can actually accomplish things and feel good about what you’ve really achieved.

Here is why cutting out crap from your daily schedule will exponentially increase your progress and odds of success.

The zen-like state of focus takes approximately 3 hours to enter. If you have 5 things on your plate, or even 3, do you think you can fit in more than 3 hours for each of them? The reason why flow is so coveted is because progress becomes effortless and you tap into all of your mental cognition and focus. This immensely increases satisfaction from what you’re doing, as well as separating you from the person checking their phone every 5 minutes.

And science has shown that it takes an immense amount of cognitive strain to switch tasks. If you consider the fact that your willpower and energy are finite, you’re basically losing a LOT of steam hopping from one task to another. The very energy that can be put into what you want to get done.

And when do you think you’re tempted to change to another task? When you’re on a roll and crushing it? No, more like when you come across a roadblock. Having another task to do makes you believe “I’ll come back to this later because I’ve got y to do.” Do you think you’re more likely to come back to what you were doing if you knew that you were facing a difficult problem? When you’re focused on one thing you allow yourself to be okay with momentary obstacles. You spend your resources solving problems instead of running away. This makes progress inevitable.

Lastly the thing with doing so many things at once, whether it is multitasking or through the day, or even through the week is that you’re giving your brain TOO many options. “How could that be bad?” You probably are aware of the paradox of choice. You’re more prone to regret the more opportunities you gave up choosing something. If you’re bombarded with all the things you can do at a given moment, isn’t it obvious that you’re going to be overwhelmed? You’re more likely to slip and do something that is completely unproductive and easy instead. If you give yourself one option instead of many versus slacking or procrastinating, you will be MUCH more accountable to yourself.

So not only is your energy, willpower, and time wasted by believing you can effectively get multiple things done, NARROW YOUR FOCUS. That enables your brain and body to get the most done AND feel fulfilled.

-FriendlyTitan