“You can do anything you put your mind to.”
Whoever said this never had to deal with irate bosses, cell phones, monthly bills, rss feeds (see right!), e-mail, twitters, advertisements, and other indispensable noises of modern life. Until we evolve blinders to deal with our information overload, we must develop methodologies to cope.
Soon, we’ll have audio beamed into our heads, giving marketers unlimited ability to drive our brain noise from afar. Mental control via self-discipline will be the only way to have a thought independent of all the noise entering our heads.
For now, however, we still have a rush of data to process in any given day, without reliable systems to organize this data, both in time and context, things slip through the cracks in our overwhelmed minds.
Give up control – The essence of Getting Things Done. Find the systems, online, or off which you can trust to remind you what you need to do when it needs to be done, and get it off your mental plate.
Information Diet – Advocated by Tim Ferris, of 4 Hour Workweek fame. He doesn’t read a newspaper, and relies on the people he meets to tell him the important information of the day. Plus it adds context for interaction, which we all need.
Create space – Meditate, clean up your mental/physical space, whatever you need to do to make room in your mind where focus can rise. With all the junk of what you have to do, what you should do, and what you want to do out of the way…
Practice focus with passion – Run, play an instrument, program, make love, anything which you can get in the ‘zone’ with and exist in a state of focus for a while. Your passion doing what you enjoy should feedback into your focus and draw you ever further into the activity. As soon as you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, stop.
While in a perfect world, we would constantly be ‘on it’, and immersed completely in living our lives with no distractions. In reality, we need unfocused down time to relax, reflect and re-prioritize.
