I’ve always struggled with keeping myself focused on one thing. I have severe shiny object syndrome and my attention will go from one thing, to the other, then to another. I’ll get a new idea and run with it until I’m out of steam in a few hours.
I’ve tried a few things to regain my focus, which ironically, usually involved another productivity app.
However, in the past few months, I’ve found much more success with a few methods which Rich , Dave and David from Weekend Club have really helped me with.
(Weekend Club is a paid community of indie hackers who come together every Saturday to work on our side projects and stay accountable)
Over lunch one Saturday we discussed some of my frustrations about all the projects I take on and how I jump between them without making much progress. There were a few /key/ things that came out of that conversation that I needed to fix:
- Get good, regular sleep (8 hours)
- Eat better
- Exercise more
and then there were the things I could try: - Journaling
- Step back and evaluate all my projects
- Take some time out to do fun things
It’s strange because I’d never really stepped back and thought ‘Oh shit, getting 5 hours of sleep a night is probably having a detrimental impact on my productivity’ or ‘Damn, 5 McDonald’s in a week will not help my goal to become a Gymshark athlete’.
Anyway, that was the first thing I needed to sort out. Get back to basics, make sure I have some consistency in my sleep, eating habits and exercise. There is no real secret sauce to this apart from just getting on with it. I would, however, recommend reading one of my favourite books of all time, James Clear’s Atomic Habits , which helps explain how you can build any habit into your routine.
Once I’d started to get back into some good habits, I started journaling. Rich was the one that recommended this to me but I was sceptical that it would make much of a difference. That being said, I knew there wasn’t much harm in giving it a go and seeing if I could get my thoughts down on paper.
I purchased a couple of really nice Dot Grid Notebooks from my friend Callum Chapman ’s company, Dotgrid.co , picked up my pen and wrote down my thoughts onto a page. To my surprise, it was very refreshing to get all of my thoughts down on paper and I felt a sense of relief once I’d finished.
I set myself the target of doing just 1-page per day and see how long I keep it up. I’ve been doing it more or less every day for about a month and it’s been immensely satisfying - it’s helped me think though some of my ideas further, kill some not-so-good ones and get me back on track when I’m straying a little wide of the mark.
I’d recommend it to anyone who has a ton of ideas going around in their head (or they have shiny object syndrome).
This brings my nicely onto my final point - this blog. I’ve been thinking of bringing some of my thoughts from the journal to the internet. Having read this great article from Nat Eliason I thought I’d give it a crack. I’m going to commit to posting to this blog once a week, getting my thoughts out into the open using my daily journal as inspiration.
I’ll be talking about all things (no niche here, sorry), such as my business, tech, productivity, YouTube and any other fun things I find on my internet escapades