Rank Ordered Focus

Being able to focus on things is definitely a learned skill as well as an important life lesson!

We all have the situations from time to time: where we have 15 things on the list, all of them important but the issue is: what do we do first? That's definitely a challenge in the world we live in, though I suppose it's always been the case!

I know that we feel that we are special and different compared to people in years or generations past. We are actually very similar in so many ways, we just have different ways to approach or handle things than they did. I think this is a really important thing for us to remember, and a lot of people may not!

Lately I've had a sizable to-do list and it's been pretty difficult to manage it, because there are a lot of things on that list but also, they are all important and need attention. That is not a bad thing to have, because it's important for us to have things to do to occupy our time instead of being idle. People who are idle tend to get into less-than-ideal situations because they don't have something more important to do.

One of the things that is sadly being more of an issue in the world we live in is how insanely fast things are moving, and how we have to constantly be doing things at break-neck speed. We are barreling towards a cliff and we have to steer the car and make adjustments to it despite having to press down harder and harder on the gas. This is both dangerous as well as slightly exhilarating.

Having to manage so many different things in a day, we need the ability to focus and we have to find ways in which we can help ourselves focus. One of the ways I've learned to help myself focus and clear my mind a little bit is to do mundane tasks. I rather enjoy doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the floor and other things. It gives me time to just go into autopilot and do a task without having to clear the executive function part of the brain in order to focus on the task at hand.

Some people may consider this some type of ridiculous disorder they are always coming up with in the day we live in. ADHD, ADD or whatever other horse shit they are trying to push into consciousness. One of the issues I have with that, there are many, is that it assumes that what we are doing right now in this ultra-fast environment is supposed to be considered normal yet evolutionarily, we have not been juggling 35 different things in our brains. We definitely live in the best time, but it also one of the most challenging as it's pushing our physical bodies to the limit, to knowingly break many of them in order to get them to give in and undergo more ridiculous medical stuff. Can't focus on 15 tasks at once? You need medication! Yeah, fuck that noise.

I have been trying to make changes in my lifestyle and habits so that I can get more clarity and focus from myself to perform at the top notch. I'm not always completely successful, but I am happy that I have been able to make modifications in order to gain better results in some areas. I have had one noticeable improvement in my focus, and results are still pending if it's because of the change I made or others but so far so good!

Where I need to make some improvements is having a few dozen things that I need to do, and trying to get better at doing a bit of a rank-order and knock off the tasks one at a time. I tend to do 3 tasks at once, and finish them a little bit slower. It might be more efficient to do it that way, but I should try doing one at a time and seeing how it goes.

What about you, do you find yourself doing multiple things at once? How do you manage it, is it successful?