Distractions keep you from being effective

It's hard to be creative and original, to dream up a new idea and see it through. Heck, it's tough just to be competent.

But there's a magic ingredient that can help: Focus. That's what New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in a recent review of the book on remarkable people, Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell: Lost in the Crowd. Brooks noted something about these people that sometimes gets missed:

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention.... Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses.

How much control do you have over your attention? Are you hypnotized by the steady stream of info from Twitter, from IMs, your BlackBerry?

If you are, it's costing you. Big time. Your creativity, your intelligence, your basic effectiveness -- they're all being slashed to ribbons by lack of focus.

So free yourself from the noise. At least part of the time. Believe it or not, you are in control of all those tools and devices. You can say no to them any time.

And, in fact, you should say no. Turn them all off. Concentrate on one thing at a time, even if only for part of your day. Do it. It will pay off.

See also this article in The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid?, and, if you want help, see this article in Locus Magazine: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction.

Technorati Tags: fundraising, distraction

Comments

[Jocelyn Harmon]

It may be accurate to describe the "successful" as highly focused people (obsessed?) but this is SO NOT the central thesis of this book. On the contrary, Gladwell is trying to get us to STOP looking at personality as the key determinant of who ends up where and START seeing the random stars that must align to determine where we land in life.

Jocelyn