Adidas Tells Me To Find My Focus

If you’ve missed Adidas’s recent campaign tagline, it happens to be, “Find Focus.”

In this age of Information Overload and social media craze, finding focus is an excellent goal, albeit a very challenging one. So here are a few things I’ve been trying to focus on to find my focus;

1. Rule of 3. I read about this in A Year of Productivity and when it comes to becoming productivity, it entails the following;

• First, write down three things you want to accomplish today.
• Second, write three things you want to accomplish this week.
• Third, write three things you want to achieve this year.

I personally add the following;

• Write down your three most important personal values.
• Write down the three fields you must focus on (these are the big-picture themes e.g. family, learning….)

The problem with us millennials is that we try to do everything and have it all. We’re no longer keeping up with the Joneses. We’re keeping up with every Tom, Dick, and Harry…

Yet as you grow older you realize that not everything you try to do is important to you. I have a friend who complained recently, “People our age already have made downpayments on a home…”

But then I asked her an obvious question, “Do you want to own a home?”

She didn’t know the answer to that.

So here’s the thing; accept the fact that you’re not limitless. You’ll have to make a choice to what’s important to you, and you’ll have to keep the list close (I put them on an iphone note) to remind yourself whenever people around start complaining about all your ‘under’achievement. Most importantly, don’t feel guilty if you’re not focusing on the thing that’s number 4 or 5 on your priority list.

2. Mute Notifications on Your Phone. All the time.

I’ve been doing this for ages and I don’t miss much. I have a confession to make though; I’m a loner so missing my notifications doesn’t affect me as much as it would affect other mortals with normal social lives. However, I don’t like the idea of programming my neural network to get a dopamine hit whenever the phone pings, because that would make me crave it whenever I don’t get it (which is the majority of the time)thus pushing me to check my phone obsessively all the time. So I keep my phone on Silent. When I welcome distractions, I keep it on Vibrate but it’s still Silent.

The result of this? Even in the rare occasion that my phone’s volume is up, I don’t respond to pings as obsessively as other people (I can easily ignore message pings for hours before checking).

3. Define Your Circle of Control and Focus There.

It’s easy to read the news and worry about the disturbing state of world affairs. But at the end of the day, most of the stuff there is out of our control, and this anxiety just stresses our system for no reason. I’m a Muslim who doesnot live in US, and yet you should see the amount of time we’ve spent discussing Donald Trump because we would like to continue visiting the US for business trips and vacations. But at the end of the day, there isn’t much that I can personally do (only thing is to maybe make sure my American friends submit their votes and vote for anyone but Trump). So I’ve decided I’ll just stop talking about it, and thus stop worrying about.

So how are you planning to find your focus? If you like this post, support the work by subscribing to the newsletter here and get your free copy of “20 Ways To Boost Your Mood Instantly” [mc4wp_form id=”680″]

Also, check out my short story collection, “All Bleeding Stops and Other Short Stories from the Kenyan Coast,” and the non-fiction book summarizing a lot of ideas in the personal development field if you want to change your life but don’t know where to start, “Mine your inner resources”.