Practical Ideas helping my year of focus

This is my year of focus where I resolved to do whatever I do with complete focus.

These are some of the tools and ideas that have kept me on the path. Hope they help you too!

Meditation:
As I alluded to previously, I am learning meditation from the waking up course by Sam Harris.
Whenever we get distracted, Sam just asks us to take a moment to notice to observe everything that is appearing in your consciousness via visual, audible and sensory medium. The new addition to this, courtesy of Sam is that your thoughts are also appearances in consciousness and you can also observe them during your meditation. This is something that is very interesting and is sure to free you up from whatever thought distracted you. This is helping me on my journey on the year of focus.

I've also observed that the most frequent time I get distracted is when I'm waiting for my application to build on my machine. I think that is a great time to practice my meditation and also to see how I can speed up the build time.


A mindful companion to  web browsing :
A big part of that is not getting distracted by interested stories and articles. I'm able to do it sometimes, but I often end up distracted and in no time I end up swimming pretty fast in the stream of hyperlinks and feeds that I frequent. I have installed an extension called 'Mindful Browsing' on chrome. This extension gently asks you if you really want to spend time on a time sink which you are aware of ? It also allows us to setup an alternative activity we would be rather doing. This is helpful to certain extent. But our behavior also controls it to some extent. If you gave in and clicked '10 mins' once on the mindful browsing extension, there is all the more chance that you will do the same again after 10 mins.

Deep Work Rules: 
Another thing that has helped me is just remembering the focus rules from Deep Work. My rule is that I will not browse non-work related things before 5:30 PM. When I remember this, the day is very productive. If you want to know more about deep work, check out the book here.

Thinking about contribution 
A final thing that helps me focus is thinking about contribution. We ought to use our limited time to do things we are proud of and just getting this thought has a way of getting my thoughts focused.

Feedback Analysis - Peter Druckers way to discover your strengths

Peter Drucker the esteemed management guru writes in his book, Managing Oneself about a great way to discover your strengths. He calls is feedback analysis.

It involves before any decision or action write down the expected results- what do you think will happen and why. Then after some time may be after six to nine months, review the decision compare the actual results with your expectations.

If you practice this method consistently, you will identify what your strengths are. He expects it to take around two to three years. You will also know what you're doing or not doing that are preventing you from taking full advantage of your strengths. It will also show where you are not particularly competent and where you have no strengths at all.

Once you know your strengths, try to improve your strengths and become a star performer instead of trying to improve in areas where you don't have strengths.