How to Stay Focused to Achieve Goals

It is essential to stay organized, keep the cognitive load low, and stay focused. Otherwise, the work-life balance is almost impossible and it is very hard to achieve all goals you have.

Let’s see how to reach this state of mind!

1. Clear your thoughts or Get Things Done
2. Reduce cognitive load
3. Be more organized and focused
4. Best practices to reduce cognitive load and stay focused

Clear your thoughts or Get Things Done

You probably heard about the concept called Get Things Done. It comes from the famous book by David Allen, that tells about a framework on how to be more organized. The essence of the framework is in decomposing big tasks into smaller ones and getting control over them. This book and concept in general sparked the whole industry of to-do list notebooks, calendar apps, mobile applications, trackers and so on. The concept is simple – collect everything you have to do, prioritize it, work on it, synchronize it, and reflect. If it resembles Agile methodology a lot, and this is not a coincidence.

Reduce cognitive load

Another important concept is cognitive load, which is why sometimes you feel overwhelmed while trying to do many things at a time. The human brain has limited capacity, so the more energy it spends on keeping things in memory, the lesser amount of energy it has to perform other tasks. You can improve it (and it improves throughout life until it stops being needed), but there are natural limitations. Another important thing is the stress that comes from the risk of forgetting some of the things. The stress sparks a vicious circle – more stress from the fear of forgetting things leads to forgetting more things and stressing even more about it.

The answer to this problem is to organize and reduce cognitive load – prioritize, execute, repeat. This keeps important things on your agenda and keeps you focused.

Be more organized and focused

The key is to shorten the time between the thought and recording it. Whenever you are distracted by thoughts, offload them by recording them somewhere. Your brain will be grateful for this and the anxiety will be lower. Some examples of such thoughts that pop up in our head hundreds of times per day

• Your work proposal keeps being ignored and it constantly bugs you? Record it in one of the to-do list applications, plan when to push it again next time, and forget about it until the day your to-do list app reminds you about it.
• You keep scheduling a haircut when you already promised to attend a friend’s reunion? Record both events in one of the to-do list of calendar apps and see the scheduling conflict right away

I highly recommend using Google Calendar as a calendar app and Todoist application for to-do lists. Both apps are intuitive, they have clients for all devices and most of the functionality is free. I have been using Google Calendar and Todoist for over a decade now. Also, I am still waiting for Todoist to invite me to their office for a cup of friendly tea so I can shake their hands (for the context, you get one point for every completed task).

Best practices to reduce cognitive load and stay focused

1. if you can not get something out of your head, record it somewhere, plan the reminder for this thing, and relax or focus on things that are truly important
2. spend a couple of minutes on planning and organizing yourself, it will give you at least days and weeks of free time that you can reinvest into yourself
3. use the power of reminders (some apps even have reminders based on location). For example, I have a daily reminder to take a cold shower to make myself more energetic and focused
4. if you feel like you are hooked on those to-do tasks, reminders, scheduling – do not worry, you will get over it and reach the comfortable pace and level of attention

Staying organized and focused is necessary to achieve personal goals. Record everything, organize it, split it into smaller tasks, plan these tasks, get reminded about them. Control what and when you are doing things that are important.

There is a bonus in the end of every completed item from to-do list or calendar event that did not clash with other events – you get a small dose of dopamine after every completion. Who are we not to accept such nature’s gifts!

Let’s jump to the last step in achieving true personal efficiency.