Why You’re Always Distracted - 5 Mistakes Ruining Your Focus

Summary

Ali Abdaal dives into the art of remaining focused amidst distractions in modern life. Highlighting the importance of focus as a life-changing skill, he outlines five common mistakes that disrupt our ability to concentrate. These include lacking a clear plan, ignoring emotional responses, multitasking too much, not breaking tasks into focused intervals, and neglecting physical health basics. He shares insights from psychological studies and personal experiences to offer practical tips. Effective strategies like using a calendar, managing emotions, focusing on one task, taking regular breaks, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle are discussed as crucial tools to enhance focus and productivity.

Highlights

• The quality of life is directly linked to one's ability to focus 🎯
• Distractibility can stem from not having a clear plan or goal 📅
• Negative emotions such as anxiety can undermine focus 🤯
• Splitting attention between tasks reduces effectiveness 🔄
• Taking breaks improves task performance and creativity 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Establishing a plan and sticking to it helps maintain focus 🔖
• Emotions like boredom and anxiety can cause distractions – address these feelings head-on ✨
• Multitasking leads to attention residue; focus on one task at a time 🔍
• Take regular breaks to recharge and maintain productivity ⏰
• Physical health plays a crucial role in your ability to focus; get enough rest, eat well, and exercise regularly 💪

Overview

In a world buzzing with constant distractions, mastering focus is akin to wielding a superpower. Ali Abdaal shares his personal journey of realizing the power of focus during his med school years, where distractions led to suboptimal performance. With insights from productivity research and psychology, Ali explains the detriment caused by not having a clear plan and how crucial setting intentions and following through can be in achieving traction.

Ali delves into the emotional undercurrents that often pull us away from our tasks. Distractions aren't just about shiny objects pulling away our attention, but about our fears and self-doubt silently disrupting our workflow. He shares how acknowledging these feelings and reframing tasks to be more interesting can mitigate their impact. For instance, utilizing the mantra 'fast, bad, wrong' can free the creative mind from anxiety and blocks.

Finally, Ali emphasizes the importance of singular focus, taking breaks, and maintaining physical health as vital components of keeping distractions at bay. Whether you're juggling emails or trying to muscle through that latest script, ensuring your body is well-rested, nourished, and exercised can drastically improve your cognitive abilities. Adopting systematic approaches to manage time like using productivity sprints – work hard, break hard – showcases the value of balanced work ethic.

Why You’re Always Distracted - 5 Mistakes Ruining Your Focus Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 being able to not get distracted is genuinely one of the most life-changing skills if we want to improve our lives in any way if we want to make progress on our studies or in our work or in our side hustle or even like being present with our families for goodness sake that all requires this magical ability called focus it requires the ability to focus on one thing and one thing only and to be fully present in just doing that one bloody thing the thing is we are bombarded by distractions all the time we have our social media notifications pinging right left and Center we have messages and emails and whatsapps and
• 00:30 - 01:00 text messages and it's like it's so easy to get distracted these days with all of the Endless Options that we have available to us and the reason why I think it's so incredibly important to cultivate the ability to focus and this is the thing that I've really realized over the years that the quality of my life is directly proportional to my ability to focus and I've had periods of my life where I've really really really struggled to focus my first year of med school for example was a year where I really struggled to focus I was burning the midnight oil feeling really overwhelmed feeling very really stressed and didn't even do that well in my exams but then as I started to research more
• 01:00 - 01:30 about productivity you know reading papers about it doing an extra degree in Psychology as well I I sort of realized that there there actually are a bunch of different techniques that we can learn to help us focus better and if we can just learn and apply those techniques it massively boosts the quality of our life okay so in this video we're going to go over the five key mistakes that cause us to get distracted and to not be able to focus and let's start with mistake number one now there was one thing that I read that really made this mistake hit home for me and that was when I read near eel's book indestructible
• 01:30 - 02:00 this is a book about how to be indestructible and how to avoid distractions and all that kind of fun stuff and we're probably going to do a video about it at some point but right at the start of the book he says something like really really profound which is that the opposite of distraction is traction and traction is when you are doing something intentionally to move you towards where you want to go and distraction is when you are doing something that takes you away from where you want to go but then the next thing he says is that in order to actually know what the thing is you
• 02:00 - 02:30 want to do and what the thing is you want to avoid you have to actually have a plan cuz if you don't have a plan you can't be distracted because you never had a plan to begin with distraction happens when we are intending to do one thing and then we find ourselves doing something else and so mistake number one that we all make that I make all the time when I find myself getting distracted is just not having a plan when you don't have a plan and you sit down at your computer or on your phone with nothing in mind as to what you actually want to do that is when you're
• 02:30 - 03:00 going to end up doing all the other small things this is kind of what social media platforms are designed for when you go on a social media platform you don't usually go on it with a particular goal in mind it's like someone who's just browsing I'm just going to go on YouTube and I'm going to see what's up I'm literally Outsourcing the decision of how I'm going to spend my time which is the single most valuable resource that I have I'm Outsourcing that decision to a team of thousands of developers whose in whose goal is to keep me on the platform for as long as possible and to serve me ads for as long as possible so that the platform can
• 03:00 - 03:30 make money I like the team behind YouTube I've met some of them they're very nice people but like those are the incentives of these social media platforms so the key thing is that we need to make a plan in order to avoid getting distracted and the single biggest mistake that people make that causes them to get distracted is not having a plan this is something n talks about in his book as well he says you know whenever people come to me and they say I'm struggling with distraction I struggle to get distracted he says show me your calendar and show me what you were what you were intending to do in that time block a if you don't use a calendar you should start using a calendar because it's gamechanging because it's Lally a log of what you
• 03:30 - 04:00 intend to do and B if you have created a Time block let's say the in in this hourong time block I'm intending to write my PowerPoint presentation or I'm intending to work on my book or I'm intending to film a video or I'm intending to study for that exam whatever the thing is once it is in there as an intention now you can actually have traction and move towards it and the remarkable thing about the human brain is that when we set an intention when we set a goal for something way more likely to Marshall up all the rare all the all the relevant resources and kind of mental faculties to get there whereas if we don't set a goal we just going to be ending up kind
• 04:00 - 04:30 of a drift now once you've mastered the ability to focus and not get distracted then one of the things you're going to have to figure out is what you actually want to do with all of that spare time that you've got freed up and I know a lot of people in my audience are aspiring content creators or current content creators now if you are in the content creation World in any capacity then one thing that can really help you with ideas or titles or thumbnails or video scripts is generative AI which is becoming more and more important and if you want to learn more about using AI for your YouTube channel or your content creative business then I would really recommend you check out the completely
• 04:30 - 05:00 free ebook that's written by hopspot which is called using generative AI to scale your content operations there is a link in the video description you can downloaded completely for free and it's an amazing guide that will get you started with using AI in terms of the different AI tools and how to write prompts for them and all the different ways to use AI for your content business you'll understand how to simplify your research how to repurpose content and how to break through writer block as well and me and my team have really found the example prompts and tips in particular for working with AI particularly useful because we are still trying to figure out how to leverage AI for our content but in a way that still
• 05:00 - 05:30 retains my voice and like Good Vibes and authenticity and all that kind of fun stuff but does in fact use this amazingly powerful tool that we now have access to this ebook was made by HubSpot which is today's video sponsor so thank you very much to HubSpot for sponsoring the video and make sure you check out the completely free resource okay let's move on to mistake number two now once you've made a plan and you're sitting down to do the thing whatever the thing is and you still are finding yourself getting distracted by whatever then the mistake people make is thinking I'm just a distracted person or I just can't focus or you know you start telling
• 05:30 - 06:00 yourself these identity type statements that's like a key mistake uh another mistake is to blame the social media companies sure we can blame the social media companies will we like but like you know fundamentally it's our job to control our and psychology and all that all that fun stuff but really generally when we once we've got a plan and we get distracted it's because we are it's it's because there's some sort of negative emotion that's at the root of our distraction and so really mistake number two is ignoring how you feel this is a lot easier for guys to do because normally dudes are really bad me
• 06:00 - 06:30 included at understanding how they feel about stuff you might not even be aware that there is some sort of negative feeling that you're trying to avoid but here is a rule that I like to I like to think of in my life whenever I'm getting distracted provided I've got a plan I will just assume that there is some sort of emotion that I'm trying to avoid that's all there is to it step one do I have a plan and step two okay I have a plan and I'm getting distracted therefore what is the negative emotion I'm trying to avoid now there are broadly three categories of negative emotion that we try and avoid boredom
• 06:30 - 07:00 anxiety and self-doubt again not sexy stuff to say if you're a dude watching this but like I I feel anxious and I feel self-doubt and I feel low confidence about my ability to do this task it's not a thing that we find it very easy to admit to ourselves but it's true let's start with the anxiety and the self-doubt because like generally the feeling the negative emotion behind these two things is fear I am afraid I'm not good enough I'm afraid to do this thing I got this a lot when I was writing my book I really struggled cuz I had my time block I had my plan to write however many hundred words or however many thousand words during the session
• 07:00 - 07:30 but I had so much anxiety and so much self-doubt around my ability to write a book like oh what if people don't like it what if the reviews are bad what if it's like why would anyone care what I have to say all of these feelings around fear really block me and then I would feel the negative emotion come up sometimes I'd be aware of it other times I won't be aware of it and it would just be easier to soothe Myself by opening up my phone or going on YouTube and watching asmin gold TV doing a video essay about World of Warcraft or something like that I wasn't acknowledging the fact that really the
• 07:30 - 08:00 reason I was getting distracted was because I was avoiding this feeling of fear this feeling of anxiety and then this feeling of self-doubt and you know the the hack I found for this was you know there's various hacks that Writers come up with to overcome this righteous block because writers block is fundamentally like some sort of feeling that we're that we're struggling to deal with but one way I found to deal with that was just the idea of fast bad wrong FBR and it's like if the goal is to make something fast and bad and wrong then great yeah I I have pretty high confidence in my ability to make something fast bad and wrong and
• 08:00 - 08:30 therefore the negative emotion goes away I've also got a bunch of strategies in chapter 5 of my book around like how we can overcome the negative emotion of fear but like that is a big part of why we get distracted because there is some sort of anxiety or self-doubt that we're feeling the second big part of why why we get distracted is because the task that we're trying to do is just really really really boring unfortunately we all have to do things at times that are not that are kind of boring the trick here is something that I have on my phone my phone wallpaper if this focuses What would this look like if it
• 08:30 - 09:00 were fun I have it on my phone these days normally I have it as a posted note on my computer monitor what would this look like if it were fun how do you make your work feel good how do you make it enjoyable and how do you make it energizing in the book we talk about play and power and people these are the three PS that we can apply to whatever work we're doing to make it more fun because if the thing is a little bit more enjoyable then you are a lot less likely to get distracted by the thing oh and by the way if you're interested in learning more about what near says in the book indistractable you should read the book but if you don't want to read the book you can absolutely check out the summary of that book over on short form they're not sponsoring this video
• 09:00 - 09:30 but I do have an affiliate link down below they even have a summary of my book so if for whatever reason you don't want to read this and you'd rather read a book summary of it you can check it out in short form uh there's a link down below it's an affiliate link but it does also give you 20% discount if you feel like reading book summaries it's my favorite source of book summaries all right now we come to mistake number three and the way we understand this is a psychological concept called attention residue now this is a term that was introduced by Professor Sophie Leroy at the University of Washington in a paper published in 2009 now in her work Sophie
• 09:30 - 10:00 shows that when you switch from task a to task B your attention doesn't instantly follow there is a residue of your focus that stays stuck on task a and this residue on the previous task can completely ruin your performance on the current task because your brain is not yet fully transitioned to the next task and really the thing is that our brains are not designed to keep parallel tracks of attention going it is a lot easier for us to focus on one thing at a time rather than try and sort of split our Focus across multiple things and so switching between many different tasks within a work block might make you feel
• 10:00 - 10:30 like you're doing a lot of work but it can actually be really counterproductive and cause you to get distracted and so the key lesson here is when you are doing something do one thing at a time trying to work on your writing and also reply to slack messages and also reply to this email and also work on this other design task that you're doing at the same time it's just not going to work like trying to do things in parallel generally is a lot less efficient and a lot less effective than trying to do things in series I.E just one at a time practical thing here is for example turn off notifications turn on the focus mode on your phone and on all your devices I have the feature on
• 10:30 - 11:00 on my Apple devices that shares Focus mode between devices so I'm not even going to see notifications if they pop up I always have my phone face down on the table in front of me so that I don't even see the notifications and just before filming this video I opened up slack and I saw that I had about 18 unright messages on slack that I got I was tagged in and I was thinking you know what that's fine I'm not even going to look at them because I just know that if I even look at those 1800 messages it's going to cause some sort of attention residue it's going to cause me to lose focus it's going to get me distracted sometimes what I like to do is in the middle of day like like maybe
• 11:00 - 11:30 after having lunch or something where I've got half an hour of like empty empty time before the next meeting or whatever I'll use that time to do the shallow work to just kind of go through WhatsApp and reply to things and just generally wander around somewhat aimlessly kind of replying to stuff here and there and that's fine but it's fine because that's sort of the intention that I've made for that particular block of time the more intentional we can be with the blocks of time that we have in our calendar and and in our life the more likely we are to actually make time for the things that really matter to us oh by the way if you're enjoying this video so far then you might like to check out my completely free 7-Day Focus
• 11:30 - 12:00 crash course it's at Focus crashcourse tocom it's completely free you enter your email and then every day for 7 days I'll send you an email that has some principles and strategies and evidence-based tips on how to become more focused so completely free check it out all right let's talk about mistake number four now so when I was doing the research for my book there was a tech company that I discovered called the drum group and basically this company wanted to find out what made their most productive employees different from their least productive employees basically what they found was that the most productive employees worked Less
• 12:00 - 12:30 hours and took more breaks than the least productive employees and so what they did was they used a Time tracking app that they installed on all their people's devices and stuff and they founded the group Elite workers I.E the top 10% in terms of productivity they worked intensely for 52 minutes on average and then they would take the next 17 minutes off and within those 52 minutes they were doing intense focused deep work single tasking focusing on just one thing and then in the next 17 minutes these guys were really resting so they weren't really checking slack or like looking at email every 5 minutes they were actively taking a break during
• 12:30 - 13:00 that time and I really like having these two numbers in mind 52 and 17 they're kind of weird numbers like you know I wish there was there probably a better way of like I don't know 50 and 15 or something but 5217 is like a pretty reasonable ratio of work to break time and I certainly find for myself whenever I'm working on something I have like a Lord of the Rings music in the background and I can see how much time has elapsed in the three-hour playlist and usually by the time it gets to 40 50 minutes I start to feel myself itching to do something else itching to get distracted and like wanting to check
• 13:00 - 13:30 emails and stuff and then I look at the timer and I'm like oh okay it's been 48 minutes now it's time to take a break okay so there's a couple of different ways that we can apply this Insight one way of doing it is by setting yourself an intention that for the next 45 minutes or 50 minutes or 30 minutes or hour like you time block a certain amount of time where you intend to be focused on that one task and you don't deviate from that task during that time for me personally I don't really like that style approach where I sort of fix fixedly like give myself a fixed amount of time to do the thing un unless I have
• 13:30 - 14:00 like a meeting coming up or something that I have to do in which case obviously I'll give myself a fixed amount of time generally what I prefer to do is I prefer to whack on the Lord of the Ring soundtrack and then I just work for as long as it takes me to feel as if I can just make full full Focus progress on that one task whatever the thing I'm doing is and then when I do find myself getting distracted or like wanting to do something else I'll look at the timer and I'll see okay cool 38 minutes of past that's fine it's time to take a break and I sort of recognize that feeling Within Myself that when I feel the need to do something else that
• 14:00 - 14:30 is when it is a very good time to take a break to get up to make a coffee to do a Wii to do whatever the thing is and the key thing to remember is that the thing that you do during the break should not generate any additional obligations because if for example you use your brakes to check your messages now checking messages is going to generate a bunch of random tasks for you to do and then that's going to cause you to get distracted from the thing that you are actually trying to do next so take a break take a proper break do something that does not generate any additional obligations and tasks on your time ideally and now we come to mistake number five and and for most of this
• 14:30 - 15:00 video actually for all this video we've been talking about software problems problems with you know the way that we respond to things in our brain or the way that we operate this is problems with the software but one of the biggest things that ruins our focus and causes us to get distracted is problems with our Hardware I.E our body and our brain in terms of diet and exercise and in particular sleep this is the stuff everyone already knows you should be sleeping 8 hours a night you should be eating healthy food we all know what healthy food is eat like an adult don't eat like a child we should be doing exercise every day ideally I found it
• 15:00 - 15:30 incredibly helpful just going to the gym first thing in the morning so for example this morning from 8:00 till 9:00 a.m. I had a gym session and yesterday was leg day and the day before that which was was chess day and I find that going to the gym four or five times a week in the mornings is incredibly helpful for my energy levels and for my ability to not get distracted during the day unfortunately I didn't get much sleep last night because I was watching Dune po 2 and then I got home at like midnight and then my mind was buzzing because I watched a few video essays about like how Dune part 2 was made and then I was buzzing with all the things and I was like oh okay damn you know my brain's on got I've got to wake up for
• 15:30 - 16:00 the gym at 7:30 damn sleep time is cut down and I was like okay cool I need to meditate and so I didn't get my 8 hours of sleep unfortunately which is why today I know I'm more likely to have issues as as it relates to focus and getting distracted which means I need to be even more on my aame and just really focus on building that plan not falling into these other software mistakes to make up for the fact that I've had only like four and a half hours of sleep last night because I was watching videos about June part two it becomes a lot easier to stay focused and not get distracted when you have taken care of the hardware stuff so if you're not
• 16:00 - 16:30 sleeping if you're eating like crap and if you're not getting exercise of course you're going to struggle to focus like you can't expect to be able to focus if this hardware and if your health is absolutely terrible so often when it comes to software problems you kind of want to deal with the hardware stuff first one thing that my friend s Bloom often says is that you know there is no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5:00 a.m. and does a workout you know when I first heard him say that I was like huh are you saying everyone has to wake up at 5:00 a.m. it's like that's not what he's saying what he's saying is that if you wake up an hour earlier and just exercise you are going to be taking care of
• 16:30 - 17:00 yourself in a way that you might not be doing otherwise and that actually bleeds into all of the other areas of your life and really helps you to stay focused and avoid distraction this is why every single highflying CEO I've ever spoken to works out first thing in the morning but generally when I speak to people when at events and talks that I do if someone comes up to me and says that they struggle with distraction or they struggle with staying focused and I have time to talk to them about a few things usually I find out that they're not exercising they're not eating particularly well and they're not
• 17:00 - 17:30 sleeping particularly well so in that case of course you're going to struggle with focus and of course you're going to get distracted so I would say the thing to keep in mind and the thing that I like to keep on reminding myself is that yes we can have all these software issues yes we can install all the apps in the world and use the focus modes and all that kind of stuff but without the hardware without our body and our mind being in tiptop shape it's going to be really hard to do all this stuff but if our body and mind is in tiptop shape it becomes a lot easier to do all of these things that we want to do okay so hopefully you got something from this video I would love for you to leave a comment down below about one actionable
• 17:30 - 18:00 thing that you're going to do to apply in your life in order to not get distracted and to focus better and if you're interested in hearing more this video is actually the first in a three-part series that we're working on about how to be more focused because we realize that when we poll our audience and stuff that like everyone really struggles with focus and so we're going to make more videos about it and video number two is going to be about some strategies and techniques that you can use and video number three is going to be about my favorite tools to stay more focused so those videos will be right over there in this little playlist that I've created for you thank you so much for watching and see you in the next video bye-bye