LIFE HACK – Stay on Target! One Handy Tip to Help You Focus on Your Chosen Task
It’s so difficult to stay on target sometimes. We’ve been conditioned to have such low attention spans.
That said, there are ways to not only keep focus, but improve your focus. I made a video talking about one great tip that helps you do just that. It’s my favorite of the many tips suggested in the book 100% Focused: 25 Great Ways To Improve Your Focus And Concentration by John Morgan.
Here’s the link to the post I spoke about in the video:
Sit down to do your work or practice and give yourself a time limit, like 15, 30, or 45 minutes. That’s how long you will work. Set that on your timer and start it.
As soon as you do, start the stopwatch as well.
Get to work. The moment you lose focus by getting distracted, daydreaming, or stop working/practicing for any reason. Stop the stopwatch.
Get the notepad and write down from your stopwatch, how long you worked before you lost focus.
Reset your stopwatch, start it up again and return to work/practice.
If you lose focus again, stop the stopwatch and make a note of how long you worked this time. Did you do better? Worse?
Try to beat your time. Continue this until your timer goes off.
The point of this exercise is to train your focus. Ideally you should eventually be able to fill the entire time without losing focus. If you do, increase the time on the timer and try to fill that time too.
ART/LIFE HACK – 5 Steps to Help You Get Up Early to Do Your Art…and Like It
If you’re anything like I was, you have a heck of a time waking up in the morning.
I’d hit the snooze button a few times after my alarm went off and ended up rushing to work because I was late.
The thing is, mornings are a really good time to get things done that we usually spend sleeping.
I LOVE sleeping, but I’d much rather be able to get work I love done than sleep it all away. Especially because I have much more energy in the mornings than I do in the evenings. The one thing we have precious little of in life is time.
Ideally for me, the weekends are the perfect time to get art done in the morning. During the week, I have other things I need to do in the mornings that aren’t art related before work (like exercise).
But how the blazes do I wake up to do what I want to do…and like it?! That was the question that had been bugging me for a while.
The Miracle Morning is a book that systematizes waking up early so it can be made easy AND habitual.
It’s also unapologetically, a marketing book for the author who is constantly leading you to subscribe to his website. But that’s okay, because the info is so good, you don’t mind too much. Besides, it’s not like I don’t do it myself.
The system it proposes is worth trying. I started doing it and I found that it works VERY well.
So now I’m going to share with you the waking up part of the system in the book. This alone is worth reading the book for but there’s a few other things in it that builds on these steps, worth reading.
I’m going to share these steps here. You can try them out so you can get some art done in the morning and feel really good about yourself.
5 Steps to Waking Up Quick Without Hassle
1. Mentally prepare the night before
The first thing you should do is mentally prepare yourself to wake up when your alarm clock rings.
Simply make a mental affirmation to yourself. Tell yourself something to the effect of,
“It’s ___ o’clock, tomorrow I’m going to wake up at __am. I’ll have plenty of sleep and I’ll be energized. As soon as my alarm goes off, I’ll wake straight up and start my day, live life and get things done.”
You can download the “official” version which is much longer HERE. Anyway, the point is, that the last thing you think to yourself before sleeping is the first thing you will think when you wake up. So think positive about waking up.
DO NOT say to yourself,
“Uh, I’m sooo tired, I’m going to be sooo tired in the morning,” you’re sabotaging yourself if you do that.
2. Put your alarm clock far away
Put your alarm clock somewhere in the room that you have to physically get up out of bed to turn it off. That will absolutely get your butt up quick.
That alarm clock is so annoying.
Once you’re up DON’T go back your bed. YOU ARE UP. Take advantage and immediately do step 3.
3. Drink a glass of water
You’ve been sleeping and have become somewhat dehydrated. It’s one of the reasons you’re tired. Drink a glass of water. Make sure you put it near the alarm clock the morning before.
That way, you’re up and you just drink. The act of drinking will also help wake you up and you’ll start becoming hydrated.
Once you drink the water all up, you do step 4.
4. Brush your teeth
This is very odd but it actually really helps. Especially since most toothpastes are minty and burn your mouth.
You can also splash a bit of water on yourself while your at it.
Once that’s done, you move to the next step.
5. Get dressed
It’s official, your up and out of your sleeping clothes. You can take a shower first if you’re not changing into exercise clothes.
Once you change, it should mark the beginning of your work time. You’re up and ready to get to work.
Conclusion
I’ve been doing this for a while. Actually, I’ve been doing this and following the rest of the routine, and I found I enjoy it.
The getting up to turn off my alarm clock is a HUGE help and it doesn’t allow me to think about whether I should stay in bed or not. I don’t get the option.
That, and the fact that I tell myself before I go to bed that I’m going to wake up when it goes off. That last thought thing actually helps.
If you do this for about 30 days, you may find that you don’t know how you lived without it.
There’s a little more to it than I’m presenting here to think about. So if you really want to get into the whole routine, you should read the Miracle Morning.
It has a little bit of advice about habit building as well, which is very handy to know.
Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think.
Do you have a morning routine that works for you? Let me know. Share it below.
Who doesn’t want to be like Batman or Superman or be as focused as a Jedi? Who doesn’t want to take a little pill and be awesome like Bradley Cooper was in the movie Limitless? (I love that movie.)
Man, I’d love to be able to not only get more things done but also, be the best me I could be.
Eat right, be healthy, have energy, know a lot of things, have a great prayer life, have great skills to draw upon at my finger tips. Be at my peak and always keep getting better.
Well, it turns out there’s a way to do this. You do this by hacking your habits. You replace your bad habits with great habits and then you add more great habits on top of those.
Why Habits?
What exactly are habits? Habits are like programs that your body runs on automatic whenever an exterior or interior cue is triggered. It’s what you do on autopilot under certain circumstances.
This is a HUGE deal. Imagine being able to practice drawing, eating healthy, thinking good thoughts and being happy, effortlessly because your body just goes and does it without thinking about it. That’s what habits have the potential to do.
The reason you’re not doing many of the things you’d love to do right now, is because, over many years, you’ve involuntarily programmed bad habits into your brain.
Therefore, the best way to get yourself to become your best self is to reprogram and override your bad habits with new good ones.
The problem is most of us don’t know much about habits at all.
So What to Do?
There’s way too much to know when it comes to learning about habits, so I’m going to recommend three great sources to get you started on the right path and I’ll add a few tips of my own.
My first recommendation is to watch the video below. It’s amazing, short and gives you a list of pragmatic steps to take (thanks to Jeff Wamester for the link):
Second, use the habit forming technique above to read two great books on habits (and yes, they’re affiliate links. Thanks for your support). One great habit to pick up is reading good books.
And if you don’t like to read and would rather listen to the book it’s also available on Audible.
This book is great in showing you how habits work in the mind and the science behind the discoveries. It also shows you how to breakdown habits to their component parts in order to be able to manipulate and change them. It’s well worth reading.
Unfortunately, this book has no audio version, so you’re going to have to suck it up and read it.
It’s well worth it though. Unlike the Duhigg book, habits aren’t really broken down scientifically. Instead they’re broken down more practically. It’s a bit more, step by step, “this is how to you go about breaking and creating habits”. Which is fantastic.
In fact, it’s a more developed version of the tips in the video above.
Both books compliment each other immensely well.
My Personal Habit Making Tip
I’m going to add my two cents here. Just some thoughts building off of some things written about in the two books based on my experience.
Make absolutely sure you find out what exactly is the triggers that trigger the bad habits you want to change. Sometimes the trigger for ONE habit may have multiple cues. You need to find them all.
Once you do, pre-visualize your course of action. Yes, you know the habit you want to install or supplant is. And yes, you have an action planed, BUT your original bad habit may come to mind more often than you want. Make a habit of pre-visualizing the positive good habit whenever you think about the cues that trigger the bad habit.
You will act upon the action you think about most, and if that thought is more often about the bad habit, it will be far more difficult to install the new one. It may very well cause you to go back to the bad habit. So, keep your thoughts in check. Visualize yourself succeeding with the good habit and your body will automatically follow.
I hope this has helped. What good habits are you most interested in acquiring? Let me know in the comments below.
Do you want more hours in the day to do what you want to do? Do you want to get more things done faster? Do you want to do this without feeling tired all the time?
My answer to all those questions was, “yes,” and I found how to do it.
I’ve been “hacking” my sleep.
I tend to only sleep about four hours every night.
Here’s the three reasons why I now “hack” my sleep.
1. There simply isn’t enough hours in a day.
I needed more hour to work on my stuff. I’ve got way too many things to do and not enough time to do it. So sleep had to go.
There’s 24 hours in the day. Depending on what time I wake up, and leave work, I spend about of 2 – 4 hours in transit driving between work and home. Yeah, I live far away from and work and traffic is just awful, depending on when I leave for work.
24 – 4 = 20 hours
Once I’m at work I spend eight hour there, sometimes a bit more, not including lunch, which would makes it nine hours.
20 – 9 = 11 hours
If I get home at decent time (around 6 or 7 o’clock) I spend that time eating dinner and being with my kids. They usually go to sleep around 8pm.
11 – 2 = 8 hours
Depending on traffic, I might get an hour extra around this time.
Even if I stay up, an hour more, I only have one, maybe two hours to work on my own stuff before I need to go to sleep, otherwise I can’t function.
8 – 1 = 7 hours
So that’s seven hours of sleep or so then I and have to start it all over again.
I just don’t have enough time. I needed a way to get more. So I cut out sleep.
So I was listening to Lean into Art extra lean cast. It was episode #13. You can only listen to these podcasts if you sign up to the Lean into Art newsletter.
Anyway, Rob brought up this iPhone App he was using that woke him up at the right times during his sleep cycle so he didn’t feel too groggy when he woke up called: Sleep Cycle iOS App.
I found it intriguing so I downloaded it and tried it out.
I loved. It’s great.
This got me thinking about sleeping and sleep cycles. I did a little bit of research about it on the internet and found myself going down this crazy rabbit hole about sleeping less by hacking your sleep.
Here are the article I read that changed my sleeping habits:
I was convinced into trying it. I was excited about getting more time to do what I needed to do.
And you know what, it worked.
So the method I’m using is called the “Everyman 3.”
I sleep four hours, haven’t broken the three hour mark yet. For some reason I just keep falling back to sleep immediately after I wake up when I do that. I sleep four hours between 12am and 4am.
I get up, go to work which takes me an hour around that time.
At 9am I take a 20 min nap. I continue working.
At 2pm I take another 20 min. nap. I work til quitting time. My drive back is around 1.5 to 2 hours, depending on traffic.
Then I eat and spend time with the kids. They go to sleep, at the latest 9pm, and now I get three to four hours to work on my own stuff.
That’s HALF A DAY.
And I don’t really feel tired except as nap times get closer.
Do I recommend it?
Yes, although it means being very disciplined about your nap times. And you have be comfortable with the idea that you won’t get the pleasure of lounging in bed anymore.
I mean, you have to get up soon after your alarm rings, otherwise, what’s the point. You’re doing this to get more time to do things.
What do you think? Will you give this a shot? Let me know.