Focus and speed

Just get in the cold water!

 

I'm actually doing an online course on focus, with focus challenges.  But I like this aspect of this essay

Quite the contrary. By focusing you can increase your speed because you’re fully immersed in the task at hand.

Peter Seishin Wohl of the Treetop Zen Center in Oakland, Maine tells a story about watching Soto Zen monks in Japan—who dedicate their lives to cultivating philosophical focus through meditation—cleaning a monastery. They work speedily, practically running as they dust. This demonstrates that slowness isn’t the goal of focus. “Zen has nothing to do with the speed at which we do things and everything to do with the intimacy with which we do things. And by intimacy I mean, not forming a separation between ourselves, our minds, and the activities we’re involved in,” 

If you do each task single-mindedly, you’ll get better and faster with practice. Doing one thing at a time is “magic” for productivity, according to Tony Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project and author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. He explains in the Harvard Business Review that multi-tasking leads to burnout and produces poor quality work. It drains energy, perpetually drawing us away from the activity at hand, which we have to get back to.

The solution is simplicity, Schwartz suggests. Start something and do it until you finish, which can mean different things depending on the activity. Obviously, you can’t write a novel in a day. But you can segment your days so that you get a single thing done in each portion. “The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal,” Schwartz writes. 

Emotions fluctuate constantly. So, feelings aren’t reliable indicators of whether we’re doing something well or something useful. As such, productive people don’t let their feelings dictate their actions. They flip the script and let action dictate emotion, doing dull stuff which feels fun when it’s done.