7 Habits That Protect Your Focus to Transform Your Life
It's not working out, meditation, or journaling.
To be in the top 10% requires you to behave like the top 10%. Do things that set you apart.
Now, I’m nowhere near the top 10% nor will I tell you about billionaires’ routines.
But I’m going to tell you how I protect my focus so I can live a wholesome life. I don’t wake up at 5 am or go for a run, but I have completely turned around my reality in the past year.
From feeling like a complete misfit in my 9–5 with soul-sucking work, I finally do what I love for a living. And the writer’s path is treating me super well.
But the key change is — I’m energised, motivated, and aligned with my purpose.
Here’s what helped me get here.
1. Don’t Kill Your Neurons
Has the red notification number ever seduced you to click, scroll, and react?
I was cribbing yesterday in a call about how I clicked on my LinkedIn notification button after months. It agitated me so badly.
A year and a half ago, I stopped checking notifications on certain apps and instead blocked time to engage and respond there on my own.
Brain drain with notifications today is inevitable, but at least we can pick and choose our brain drain.
To do
Find out which notifications you really need to see (for me, that’s iMessage only) and mute everything else. On social networks, choose platforms where you absolutely do not need to see any notifications and never click on them.
Notifications fight for your attention and time. Don’t give them that power.
2. Refreshing Isn’t So Refreshing
If you’re a creator online, then chances are you check stats.
But here’s a little secret — refreshing stats don’t make them go up, only doing the work does.
It’s addictive to keep seeing stats of views, sales, money, etc. It’s better to shift your focus to your process of doing the work instead of refreshing stats in anticipation.
To do
Analyse and learn from your stats, but don’t depend on your dopamine on them.
3. Detach From Work
Let me tell you something that’ll harm my career if I ever apply for a job again — I never really cared about work. I wasn’t so passionate about my job that I’d work late nights and weekends on it as my colleagues did.
Once, my boss offered to help me over the weekend with a presentation. I should’ve said yes because it’d help me set a good impression. But I didn’t.
Practising this while doing your own work is difficult because it's like your baby.
For your own sanity, please detach from your work. Once you hit publish or finish a presentation or whatever you do for a living, forget about it and move on.
To do
Detach from work so you can focus on ‘the work’ and not results or what people are saying about it.
4. Energy Vampires Are Real
Once you do well (or at least plan to), you’d realise how few people around you want you to be extraordinary.
Some people will subtly talk down on you in the name of banter to cover up their meanness. Others will suck up to you.
These are your energy vampires. They’ll bring you down by seeping in a bit of their negativity into you.
After my surgery that left me in bed for 6 weeks, I clearly segmented friends into those who care and those who don’t. People 5 minutes away from my house didn’t care about me and school friends who I don’t speak to often checked up on me every day.
This showed me who my genuine friends were.
To do
Be very, very careful of who you surround yourself with.
Only keep good mates around.
5. No Instagram
You do not need to see hundreds of pictures every day of memes or people [pretending to] live their best lives.
Instagram subconsciously makes you feel
- less pretty
- less rich
- more inadequate
To do
You cannot have big ideas if you’re subconsciously feeling negative about your entire life.
Either go cold turkey on it or do it like me — I download it once in 2 to 4 weeks for under 30 minutes.
Highly encourage going cold turkey on it for a bit. I did it for 7 months and it helped me level up my self-awareness and self-esteem.
6. Curate Your Feed
“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” — Bruce Lee
What you see is what you think about. What you think about becomes dominant in your head. Your dominant thoughts become your reality.
So why do you want to think about shit? Putting in shit doesn’t bring out any rainbows.
Scrolling is inevitable, but what you scroll about is. Everybody told me Twitter is toxic, but I curated my feed by muting everyone who talks about politics and all topics I’m not interested in.
Now my feed is full of positivity, creator economy, writing, mindsets, wealth, etc.
To do
Only take in the good stuff because you can.
Curate your online feed. Block or mute what doesn’t serve you.
Be extremely possessive about what you consume.
7. Tracking Work Time
If you don’t work a 9–5, you’d want to use free software like Clockify to track your time.
You’d be surprised how much your time goes into meaningless things in the name of work. This is the reason so many people don’t pursue hobbies, workout, or take out time to read in the name of:
“I don’t have time.”
This helped me realise I want to cut down on freelancing because the time-to-money ratio was the lowest here.
To do
Track your time so you can manage and own it better.
“Energy is the essence of life. Every day you decide how you’re going to use it by knowing what you want and what it takes to reach that goal, and by maintaining focus.” — Oprah Winfrey
I often come out as a weirdo to do these things. But if being weird helps me build my life and create a business, I have no regrets.
All these are techniques to reduce external noise so your mind can make less clutter inside.
You cannot execute big ideas with a monkey mind that cannot sit down and focus.
Protect your focus and energy so you can direct it to fulfil your dreams.
