Ever want to do more with the day you have? Ever end up instead finishing the day staring at the screen as the sun goes down, watching cats on skateboards and streaming reruns of your favorite shows rather than working on your novel or business proposal? Ever get frustrated by how much time wasting this represents, and commit to wanting to stop it, but feel so wiped out you end up doing it night after night anyway?
If so, you’ve ended the day in the state of “tired yet wired”. This isn’t when you’re legitimately relaxing. It’s when you have things to do, but you just feel so unable to mentally handle one more task. Your mind only wants to veg. That’s the tired.
But it’s not physical fatigue. Your body’s not fatigued, in fact, it’s awake, and too alert to go to bed, so you don’t just head to restful sleep. That’s the wired.
You’ve run out of mental focus. You need a FOCUS BUDGET.
Realize your mental focus is a finite resource
First, realize that you don’t have unlimited focus in a day. What you bring to a task isn’t like a light that turns on and off brightly at the click of a switch. It’s more like a bank of “focus dollars” that you spend and which diminishes throughout the day as you use it, until replenished by sleep. The more dollars you spend earlier in the day, the less you have by evening. If you spend them all earlier in the day, you end up with no focus left, and feeling “tired yet wired”. Body on, but brain has run out.
What drains your focus? Legitimate work, projects, and activities, to be sure. But there are also a lot of ambient drains on it. These can include anything from a noisy workplace, to the strain of having to ignore the constantly playing muzak that’s grabbing your attention in the background of your co-working space.
Your game is to make sure you conserve your focus dollars so that, just like real dollars, you can put your mental focus budget toward what you want and need to create — not toward those focus-wasters.
Save what you're wasting
The easiest way to end up with more mental focus dollars in your day is to eliminate focus-wasters. These are usually things that involve visual and mental sifting. They are very low-level in relation to your life, work, or goal, yet drain your focus just as much as a legitimate task. Some examples of focus-wasters are:
Clutter in the home or office.
Stacks of books or papers.
The hundreds of ads you’ll inadvertently view going to and from work.
The smartphone screen alerts that pop up trying to get you to hop into Facebook, etc.
Ambient pop music (I.e. “muzak” style) playing in the background.
Take a day or more to observe your regular routines, and see where the focus-wasters are. All these things are drains on your cognitive load, and they’re using up your focus budget without you really knowing it, like when apps drain your smartphone battery down to zero. And that means you end up with LESS to use toward what you really want and need.
Work to eliminate or minimize focus-wasters in your day:
Get things in order. Takes time, but the results are so worth it!
Clean up piles, or at the very least, put them in a box, file cabinet, or area out of sight so they’re not dragging at your attention.
Dive into something good to read for your commute. It’s easier for your mind to focus on one long e-book of your choice than to have your attentional energies tugged and pulled by all the ads you’ll be exposed to visually.
Turn off your smartphone alerts, or, put your phone on airplane mode for much of the day.
Put on your own headphones (if possible) if you’re in a place with ambient music, especially pop music. I’ve found the music in coffee shops, stores, and even some co-working spaces to be a huge focus drain. Even when you're trying to not listen, your conscious and subconscious are both reacting to this background element. The songs trigger good and bad associations willy-nilly while dragging your attention and mood around. Don’t give away your focus like that. Play your own choices of music, or some meditative sounds.
Make sure there’s enough to use toward your goals
Consider your mental focus a resource to manage and use, just like money or time. With the image of focus dollars in mind, work out how to spend your valuable focus wisely on projects, activities, and studies that matter. Literally, plan ahead. See if you can block it out and make sure to reserve a good focus budget for the important tasks of your goals and achievements on a daily or weekly basis.
The more you do, the more you’ll begin to have a better awareness of how much specific tasks cost you in focus. Note that tasks involving the unknown always take a much higher focus investment due to all the new neural pathways being created. That’s important to know if you’re working through a rewarding, yet new endeavor.
Insights like these can help you make the most of the mental resources you have. The goal of the focus budget is to end each day with the correct amount of focus energy you need for afternoon and evening activities that grow your goals. After that, you can relax in confidence and really enjoy it.
Work with these ideas and see what you come up with. How will you manage your focus budget to get more out of each day?
Keep Growing,
