How to Conquer Distraction and Improve Your Life

The inherent problem: Your attention is under assault at all times.  Not being able to concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes will severely hamper any momentum you are trying to build no matter what you are trying to accomplish.

A strategy: Managing and prioritizing where your time goes is a critical step in streamlining your focus and accelerating your growth. 

In short, the more you are inundated with ways to divest of your time, the more you require an effective system for managing it so you don’t spend the bulk of your day on non-productive and non-value-added tasks. 

When you aren’t facing pressing demands from work, family or friends, you may find yourself more susceptible to allowing your time to bleed away by spending it scrolling social media, binging in front of the television, or getting lost in YouTube channels. 

You are exhausted at the end of a long day or a long week, and you tell yourself you just need a couple minutes to shut your brain off.  You crave the dopamine hits provided by these outlets and so almost unconsciously you reach for your device or remote. 

Before you know it you are down the rabbit hole of passive entertainment while the hours drift by in what feels like minutes.  Once you snap out of your trance and realize what you’ve done, you get frustrated at yourself for letting it happen again and feel a sense of guilt. 

You catalog the extended list of other things you could have been doing that would have moved the needle.  You’ve compromised your sleep schedule, mentally exhausted yourself on nothing of any consequence, and are left with a sense of emptiness because all you’ve done is engaged in one-sided, passive consumption of other peoples’ lives.  

So, what can you do about it? When it comes to the external noise, remember that addition always occurs through subtraction.  This also applies directly to negative influences in your life.  Anyone or anything that isn’t moving you forward is holding you back. 

Yes, with so much noise in the world, it is a herculean task just to be able to consciously recognize when something or someone is distracting you, let alone filter it effectively.  However, consider an incremental improvement in this area can allow you to reclaim hours of your day to channel towards more effective activities, and rewire you to stop living on autopilot when it comes to succumbing to these distractions. 

The real challenge you have in front of you is to become more skillful at identifying, reducing, and ultimately eliminating the things you know you can do without.  The key here is finding something worthwhile to help fill that void. 

How? Focus… start with small, targeted actions, repeated daily.  This isn’t some magic formula, quick hack, or secret shortcut.  Rather, it is knowing there isn’t some easier path to follow and acknowledging them for what they are – enemies of progress. 

Getting into any type of rhythm or flow state is going to require you to fundamentally change the operating system you have been using.  Remember, we’ve all been conditioned to have a short, ineffective attention span that has been blunted by years of distraction.  As entrepreneur Jack Butcher states, “You can’t eliminate distractions until you have a life you don’t want to be distracted from.” 

In sum, begin with the end in mind – what do you want to make of your life?  What does success look like?  How do you propose to achieve it? 

If you can put yourself on the road to answering those questions you won’t need to rely on technology and the media to keep you disconnected and disengaged from your own existence. 

With self-reflection, focus, and persistence you will naturally gravitate away from distractions towards something that speaks more fully to the vision of what you want to become.