How many times have you heard an athlete say that winning the medal was easy? I would venture to say none. The best in each discipline, from soccer players to programmers; they have had to invest vast amounts of time and effort to get to where they are. And they can do it because they know what attention residue is.
There is no doubt that talented people exist, but as Tim Notke said: “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”.
How do we manage to work hard? Getting up early, working hard without measuring the consequences and going to bed at dawn? That is the spirit, but it is not the way.
Cal Newport, Ph.D. and professor of computer science at Georgetown University, explains in his book Deep Work: Focused Success in a Distracted World, what is hard work and how to achieve it.
Hard work requires all our concentration, since that is when the flow of information in our neurons will allow us to reach our maximum productivity.
How do we focus?
Easy, stopping pretending that we can do several things at the same time.
We would think that by doing 2 tasks at the same time we are optimizing time and increasing our performance.
The point is that the only thing we get is to do 2 tasks halfway. A study from Stanford University found that people who tend to do several activities at the same time have more difficulties filtering out irrelevant information. Therefore they take longer organizing their thoughts.
Also, in Cal’s words, a phenomenon occurs called attention residue.
What is attention residue?
When going from doing one task to another, our brain is left thinking about what we were doing before. This prevents us from achieving the necessary concentration to reach our maximum performance.
So it is important to organize our agenda to give each activity a schedule. And not spend all day between our work, emails, social networks, emails again and so on.
Finally, to be able to work hard, our body and mind must be in a position to do so.
This is why it is important to have the ability to disconnect from what we are doing. If possible, ending the work day at a certain time should become a ritual.
Only in this way can we have the necessary time to rest, get a fresh air and arrive refreshed with energy and ideas. Otherwise, the only thing we will achieve is to be slaves to what we do and not do it to our maximum capacity.
If you still don’t know how productive you are, if you use these 19 strategies you are more productive than you think.
And remember that if you are really interested in creating your own business, you can purchase our book “How to create a company while working: Discover how to manage your time, manage your money and motivate yourself while creating a company and working for another” , where you will find all the information you need to found your own company, without having to leave your job.
