Our ability to focus is one of the most important factors to actualize success in our professional as well as personal lives. However, today’s society is full of distractions and everything around us from social media to the convenience of e-commerce makes it difficult to focus on our priorities. Sometimes, we get distracted by things that seem important at the time and without realizing it, we lose focus of our overarching goals. In this episode of the Social Work Journal, Deltom dives into scientific findings about our ability to focus, how our minds respond to various distractions, and how to fine-tune our focus in a way that helps us achieve our goals.

[00:53] Defining Focus - What is focus and why it’s important for growth in our personal and professional lives.

[03:15] Distractions – How decluttering our mind can help us avoid the distractions that keep us from focusing on our goals and tactics for identifying and avoiding distractions.

[09:37] Commodity Theory – How strategically placed advertisements affect our minds and how to not get distracted by targeted advertising.

[12:56] Urgency Bias – The findings of a scientific study that explains how the way we prioritize our tasks affects our productivity.

[18:25] Flexible Thinking – How to shift gears when necessary to figure out what’s more important to us at a given moment and prioritize the most important tasks.

[25:13] Personality Traits – How our personality traits (introvert, ambivert, extrovert) influence our ability to focus and how to identify the best conditions to achieve a higher level of focus based on your personality.

[26:06] Hyperfocus & ADHD- How hyperfocus can be a distraction as it inhibits our ability to access flexible thinking. Hyperfocus is common in children and adults with ADHD.

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Quotes

“When you knock something off of your checklist, you feel like ‘oh, wow, I got something done’. But if you think about all those little tasks, did you really get the most important things out of your day done?” -Deltom

People with ADHD tend to hyperfocus on things that are of interest to them. So like distractibility, hyperfocus is thought to resort from "abnormally low levels of dopamine"-ADDitude Magazine