How to Learn to Pay Attention, Master yourself, and Win

Whether you are a student or an employee somewhere, you have to learn how to pay attention to increase your productivity. Mastering the art of paying attention and sticking to your personal goals is the single most important factor in elevating you.

But how hard is it to learn how to pay attention?

Well, the change has to come from the inside you. To learn how to pay attention, you will have to change yourself, your views, and your self-worthiness.

To be successful in life and in everything you are working on, you have to learn how to stick on to the task and block all the external “noise”. There is an abundance of destructions in the current fast-moving technological world that will seek your attention throughout the day, right from your phone’s notifications, emails, friends, family, physical noise etc.

To win, you have to learn how to juggle all these destructions, stick to your core tasks, execute your priority tasks and get into the habit of doing so by repeating the process every day.

Here is are some steps you can take to pay attention to.

1. Categorize your tasks

When we are all swamped up with tasks, we tend to put all of them on the table and try to achieve everything simultaneously. This only leads to burnouts and missing deadlines. Multi-tasking is a destructive and unproductive approach to your tasks. Categorizing your tasks in the order of importance will help you concentrate on high-paying, high-priority tasks. That way, all your attention will be limited to the top tasks which have higher wins.

2. Take a Break

To avoid burnouts, it is important to take health breaks within tasks or/and projects. Working for long hours or days on ends on a task will only lead to burn out and reduced productivity and quality of work. It is important to take periodic breaks with tasks. Set timed breaks between tasks; reward yourself after achieving every milestone. This will keep you revitalized and always re-energized to accomplish the next tasks on the list. To nurture a creative mind, you need to give yourself breaks.

3. Learn to delegate

To concentrate on the core priority tasks that you have expertise and experience in handling, you need to delegate. Delegate involves decluttering your to-do list by giving out the low paying and low-interest functions to someone else who will be willing and able to work on the tasks better than you. That way, all your attention will be dedicated to high paying and high priority tasks.

4. Set personal deadlines

Setting personal deadlines, which are always shorter than the overall project deadlines, is the key to training your concentration levels. For example, if your project’s deadline is one week, you should set yourself a three-day deadline. Next, you need to break down the major tasks into even smaller sub-tasks with shorter deadlines (of a few hours). Human beings are designed to appreciate instant gratification; when you achieve the set mini-goals, you will be motivated to reach the next goals. This will eventually lead to finishing the entire project way ahead of time.