Focus: The Underrated Recipe to Enhance Your Life Quality
We have many aspects to take care of in our lives. Taking care of ourselves, our career, our personal matters, and our relationships with others. It must be nice to have everything under control and be doing well in every aspect of our lives. Some are able to do well in everything, and some have to sacrifice several aspects to do well in certain aspects. For instance, some are able to do well in their personal lives and their career lives, as well as in their social lives. and for some, they have to sacrifice their social life in order to do well in their career.
You may fall into the second category, and you may have accepted it with the belief that everything comes with a price, and the price of a successful career is sacrificing your social life. But actually, it doesn’t seem to work that way. In some aspects, it may be necessary to sacrifice one or two things, but not everything is really required to do that. Don’t sacrifice anything for something you don’t need to sacrifice. And actually, we can have it all without having to choose one out of many things.
We may feel we cannot have it all because we have limited time and energy. And we think it’s not possible for us with the time and energy we have to get everything. You may think the only way to have it all is to have more time and energy. Meanwhile, all of us are given the same amount of time, which is 24 hours a day, and some can do well in many aspects of their lives while others are struggling to do well in only one aspect of their lives.
Things we should take care of
Our lives don’t only revolve around our jobs. We have other things to take care of. We have family that needs our presence; we have friends to fulfill our social needs; and we have ourselves to take care of mentally and physically. When you can balance everything and take care of everything rightfully, your life quality will begin to improve.
If you’re young right now and just starting your career, your current priority may be your career. But no matter how busy you are, you still need to fulfill your social needs in order to maintain your sanity. You also need to pay attention to your parents since they’re still here, and you don’t want to see yourself regretting it when they’re not here anymore because you were busy taking care of anything else.
These three things may take a lot of energy for a lot of people, and it may make them abandon one aspect that is really important. taking care of ourselves and improving ourselves. To be able to perform optimally in every aspect of our lives, we need to have a well-functioning body, both mentally and physically. We need to train our brain and physique to improve our abilities and be able to operate at optimum levels.
Good time management
People who excel in various areas of their lives are not good at making excuses. They focus on figuring out how to do all the necessary things and fit all useful activities into their tight schedule, rather than making excuses. Actually, we are capable of doing various useful things if we can manage our time well.
The main trait everyone should have in order to be in control of everything is to be proactive. Don’t be a reactive person and become a prisoner of your impulses; be proactive and take control of your schedule. If you can take control of how you want your day to be, then you can take control of how your life wants to be. Those who are reactive get nothing at all at the end of the day because they are not in control of their schedule.
If we become slaves to our impulses, our quality of life will decrease over time. When we only follow our impulses and regularly only do things that we like, such as eating unhealthy foods, refusing to work out, or consuming useless content instead of reading useful content. In the long run, we will get out of shape, become prone to diseases, and lose our intellectual ability and logical reasoning to solve problems at work. Your quality of life will decrease, both personally and professionally.
You’re not that busy
Maybe you’re struggling to add positive activities to your daily schedule because it seems hard for you to fit all the activities into your day since your schedule is already tight. If you ever think that you’re busy and cannot do anything to improve yourself or even maintain your life outside of work, then you should review your life. Try to add up the time it takes to do your routine. Does it really take a lot of your 24 hours? And if it does, then review it again: did you do it efficiently, did you do the job inefficiently, or did you get distracted, which made it longer to do the job?
Often, the time it takes for you to finish performing a task is long because you’re distracted while doing the task. Try to break down the details you learned while doing the task. Maybe a task you finished in an hour consisted of having a conversation with a coworker for a half hour and reorienting for 15 minutes, while the task is actually possible to finish in 15 minutes if you really put all your focus into it.
Once you can see how much time is needed to finish all your tasks, you may be surprised at how much time you spent working on them compared to the actual time needed to finish them. Try to manage all your tasks efficiently so you can do all the necessary work quickly. If you can finish the task in the actual time needed to finish the task, you may have enough time to do anything else.
Avoid the multitasking trap
To get many things done in a short amount of time, people tend to multitask, hoping to get all things done at once. But it turns out that multitasking is not a good idea because we cannot perform at our optimum level if we do multiple things at once. We tend to lose focus and fail to monitor progress if we do multiple things at once. The quality of our work may decrease due to a lack of focus. And by multitasking, it took you longer to finish all the tasks if you did them all at once rather than doing them separately in the right order based on your priorities.
The reason why we cannot perform optimally when multitasking is explained by David Meyer and Ellen Salthouse in their 1997 paper, “Executive Control of Attention in Complex Skill Acquisition.” It was mentioned that humans can only focus on one task at a time and that when we try to multitask, we are actually switching our attention back and forth between tasks. This switching process takes time and effort, and it can lead to errors and decreased productivity.
That’s why, when you have many things to do, don’t do them all at once. Make priorities, do what is important first, and pour focus on each task so it can be completed quickly and excellently. And it’s far better than moving around the same task for hours and getting nothing done properly. And if you can do that, then your work quality will increase.
You only need more focus
The most important element of it all is in this part, which is focus. You may be able to schedule your time and have the determination to do everything well, but all of these are nothing if we cannot execute our plan well. And the key to executing the plan well is to be focused. Because when you can avoid distraction and be focused, you will do things efficiently. And it makes you able to finish the work faster with a better result.
If you can really focus on everything you do, you will be astonished at what you are capable of. You can do everything fast and right. The faster you finish the job, the more time you have to take care of everything else. You may be able to go home earlier, take no work home, and have more time to spend with your family or friends, as well as more time to take care of yourself and improve yourself.
If you’ve already started a family, every second you spend with your partner and children is precious. You don’t want to miss watching your kids grow up because you are busy at work because you are not good at managing your time and finishing the job. So when you’re at work, be focused on doing your job. And when you’re at home, be focused on spending time with your children. Besides, when we focus on doing things, the quality of the activity will improve. 1 hour spent with kids playing games together is better than 3 hours spent with kids talking while you scrolling social media. In everything you do, be present and focused, so the quality of your work and activities will improve.
Self-improvement Part
The main goal of doing things efficiently is so you will have more free time to add more useful activities to your day because, like previously mentioned, to be able to perform well in various tasks and activities, we have to be capable mentally and physically. If you keep upgrading yourself, you are capable of doing bigger tasks and achieving bigger things.
And to improve yourself in these aspects, you have to do regular daily activities that can improve these abilities. To improve your mental and intellectual abilities, you need to read books regularly, and to improve your physical abilities, you need to exercise more. With good mental capacity, you will be capable of solving any problem you face in work and life, so you will find no difficulties in doing your tasks and can complete them quickly and efficiently. When you have good physical capacity, you will have more strength and energy to do various tasks, be able to maintain your focus, and not get tired easily.
Train yourself like top athletes, improving their ability to push their boundaries. Despite the exceptional achievements they have made, they don’t seem satisfied with all of them, knowing they can do more. That mindset is something we should adopt. We need to always explore room to improve, and if you keep improving yourself, you will be capable of doing things you didn’t expect to be capable of.
But don’t forget that humans work like machines too; if they operate beyond their allowed capacity, they will break down; if they operate simultaneously without getting proper rest, they will overheat; and without proper maintenance, they will break down. But a great machine should be able to perform heavy tasks and be reliable in any situation.
As machines, we should know what we are capable of and try to improve our capabilities by improving ourselves. Try to get proper rest so you don’t burn out. And take care of yourself so you don’t get sick and stay healthy. Be productive, exercise more, eat healthy, and get enough rest. Then you can operate optimally in various aspects of life. When you are able to perform optimally in everything you do, you can achieve exceptional things in life.
Conclusion:
With good time management and applying focus in every task we do, we can all do various tasks quickly and with better results. Consequently, we can manage every aspect of our lives and do well in every aspect in them. We also need to always improve ourselves mentally and physically, because only with a good condition of mental and physical state we can perform optimally in everything we do.
