Why Am I Not Focused Often?

I was on a new project at my current workplace. And because I had personal problems, the tech lead in my project told me that I was sometimes phased out or I showed a lack of motivation.

At that moment, I was thinking about many other things instead of work — my personal life in areas such as my marriage and relationship with my friends. I learned to separate the two and gain motivation by understanding how to focus.

How did I become focused on my work?

I get focused by applying some advice from my mentor. The list of actionable steps my mentor told me to do every day at work were:

Create a Morning Checklist where:

1. I read emails.

2. I read messages from Slack.

3. I check my calendar.

4. I plan my day.

Create a Checklist for the tasks where:

1. Based on what I planned, I list my strategy for what I will do throughout the day.

Create an end-of-day TODO where:

1. I must submit a draft Pr of my work to Git Hub.

2. I read messages.

3. I check my calendar for the upcoming days/weeks.

What these actionable steps did to me was it helped me focus on work and completely forget about my problems in other areas of life.

Why did this help me regain focus?

I regained focus because I could take my mind from a scattered state to an ordered state. This is what I learned about focus, to know that you are unfocused, look at the different ideas that come into mind. Your mind is scattered in many other subjects. As a result, you can’t focus on the task at hand.

What is the takeaway from this?

The takeaway is to recognize when your mind is scattered. And the focus is brought back with a set of goals or objectives. These objectives take over your mind, and you forget other problems.

I am still researching this and hope to write more about my findings. Thank you for reading.