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Maintaining Better Focus

6 December 2016

Janie watched Pinkcast 1:13 The power of an hourly beep, and was intrigued by a new idea for maintaining better focus at work.

Tags: dan pink, focus, janie watched, peter bregman, prioritization and time management, productivity

In his most recent Pinkcast, Dan Pink talked about the power of using an hourly alarm when working as a tool for staying focused and minimizing distraction. He mentioned that the tip comes from Peter Bregman’s book, 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. Bregman's recommendation is that you set the alarm on your phone to beep every hour; when the alarm goes off you should do two things:

  1. Take a deep breath.
  2. Ask yourself “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?”

If you’ve gotten distracted and lost your focus, this can be a way to bring you back on track. If you are doing what you need to be doing, it will make you feel good that you are focused on the right task. Pink mentioned that he has used this technique off and on for years and finds it a helpful way to stay focused when he is writing.

I discovered the Pinkcast series earlier this year and have found several helpful tips and suggestions since I subscribed to the content. (I blogged a few months ago about Pink’s suggestion for conducting a premortem as a way of anticipating and preventing project mishaps.) December is a month that is often filled with distractions as we all anticipate the holidays and the end of the year, so I’m looking forward to trying the hourly beep to see whether it helps me stay on track at work. Have you ever tried setting an hourly alarm at work? What other techniques do you find helpful in trying to stay on track?

 



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