 Today, I'm going to be giving you seven keys to maximize your focus. This is really important because if you look at what is happening with humans, we are getting more and more and more and more distracted. Over the past 15 years, basically since the iPhone came out, and since we started using smartphones a whole lot more, the average person, their attention span has gone down about 33%. That's crazy. Let me say this one more time. Your average person that is alive right now in this world, their attention span has gone down 33% in the past 15 years. For me, I'm always looking for a way to set myself apart from everybody else to stand out, to kind of be a superhuman among humans. If I can make my focus, superhuman focus, compared to other people, I will get more done than them. If I get more done than everybody else, and we fast forward five years, 10 years from today, it's a completely different life trajectory, like a different path that I am on than someone else and there's no catching up. If you're out there and you're wanting to improve yourself and make yourself better, your focus is one of the most important things you could do, the energy that you have and the focus that you bring to something. What I'm going to teach you today is seven different keys to maximize your focus. Some of these things you've heard of before, some of the things you've never heard of before, but in writing the book that I have coming out, I've been researching this like crazy and I want to give you some tips. So number one, kind of obvious, but I'm going to give you some extra stuff, is to stay away from your phone as long as possible. From the moment that you wake up, try to stay away from your phone as long as possible. The one thing that I have realized is that when I look at my phone, there is Rob that exists before he looks at the phone each day and there is Rob that exists after he looks at the phone each day. It is like that thing ruins my focus. And so what I try to do is I have my phone that is on airplane mode and so you can either do one of two things, either number one, you can have your phone and have it be on airplane mode and have it be your alarm or buy an alarm clock and have those on the other side of the room so you physically have to stand up to go and turn them off. But what I noticed is before I ever put my phone in airplane mode before I went to bed at night, I would wake up to turn my phone off and I would have all of these text messages, all of these emails, all of these notifications of things that I had to do and it immediately went into holy shit stress mode. When you have your phone on airplane mode or do not disturb or however you prefer to do it, you don't get all those notifications. So you can turn your alarm off if you still have your alarm on your phone and then what you do is you don't look at your phone for as long as possible. For some of you guys it might be 30 minutes, for some of you guys it might be an hour, for me it's about two hours. I want to get, I like to get two hours in the morning before I ever look at my phone. So I can do my morning routine. I have my very specific morning routine. It is a routine. It doesn't feel right if I don't do it anymore. And so it's the routine of, you know, waking up going to the bathroom, brushing my teeth, coming outside to the living room in the kitchen and getting my glass of water, drinking my glass of water with the electrolytes that I have, going on to the couch, meditating for 20 minutes and then going and making my coffee and making my coffee. I'll start reading and drinking coffee for about an hour and a half. And then I'll look and see what the hell's going on in the outside world. But what I like to do is to not look at my phone for as long as possible because I have found that that allows me to be proactive in creating the life that I want to versus reactive. And then you start to think about how many times do I look at the phone throughout the day? The average person is over 150 times per day looking at their phone. How many times do notifications go off and all of the things that are on your phone? Studies have found that not looking at your phone actually relieves you from a lot of stress and anxiety because studies have found that looking at your phone on a smaller screen close to your face actually causes more stress and anxiety. Man, that's pretty wild. And so how can we not look at our phone as much as possible? Your phone is an amazing piece of technology, but you have to be the master of it. You can't let it be the master of you. And so stay away from your phone as long as possible. And when you're trying to be very focused, put your phone in a different room so that it can't even distract you. So that's number one. Number two is to prepare your brain. Huh, the hell does that mean? How do you prepare your brain? Your brain just does not like switching tasks. It doesn't. It's switching tasks uses more energy and that energy can feel bad. And so what happens is for the first six minutes when you switch a task, there will be resistance to switching that task. It's like a warm-up period. When you go into the gym, you don't just lift heavy. You should warm up a little bit. Same thing for your brain. You need to warm up to this new task. The easiest way for me to go and switch into a new task is to do six deep breaths. I just breathe in through my nose, breathe out through my mouth, and I am preparing my brain to go into this task switching. And then what I do is I do one thing and one thing only. I'm going to talk about that in just a minute. But try to prepare your brain to go from, okay, like from this, what we're going to do is I'm going to go from recording these podcast episodes to immediately recording reels. That's okay. That's not really much of a task switch for me, recording a podcast episode, talking inside of a microphone and talking to the three cameras that we have here to then recording Instagram reels. That's not really a mess of a task switch for me. But after I get done here, I have calls I have to hop on. And so that's a task switch. It's my brain being a little bit different, having to be a little bit more nimble. So I'll do six deep breaths before I go into my calls so that I can make it easier on my brain to be able to switch tasks. And so the second thing to do to make you more focused is to prepare your brain. Third thing, please do this. It drives me crazy when I have people that don't do this. Eliminate as many distractions as possible. Your phone has so many notifications. Like if you're one of those people, every time somebody likes them on Instagram or sends an email or sends a text message or whatever it might be, eliminate as many of those as you possibly can from your phone. The thing is, like, if you don't have to see when an email comes in, turn that notification off. I usually check my email twice a day. It's in the morning and in the evening. Maybe you have that opportunity to do that. Maybe you don't. But try to prepare your life to eliminate as many distractions as possible. On your computer, if it's not necessary for you to get email notifications, turn your email notifications off. Because studies have found that one distraction, like if you're sitting there and you're typing out a presentation and you get an email notification, even if you just look up into the top right corner of your screen and see, okay, Jonathan sent me an email. I probably have to send him an email back when I get done with this. That one distraction can take anywhere if you were focused and then you looked at that notification and then you went back to trying to focus. It can take you anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes to get back the focus that you had before. So just by looking for two seconds at an email notification, it's stole 15 to 20 minutes of your productivity. So what can you do to remove as many distraction people? So you have notifications. You have an email. You have a computer. You have your phone. You also have other people. What can you do to be able to remove other people as distractions? You know, if people come up to you, if you work in an office where it's open concept and people can come up to you and they can talk, can you put on headphones? Can you put, you know, headphones on and let people know that when you have headphones on, like, prepare them. When I have headphones on, unless it's an emergency, don't come and talk to me. If you have an office, can you close the door, put a sign on the door and say, doing focus work, do not open the door unless it's an emergency? Send me an email. I'll check it later on today. And what you do is you eliminate as many distractions as possible from your life to make it easier to focus. So that's number two. Number three is to stop multitasking. There's actually been a lot of studies that found that multitasking makes you dumber. And multitasking, they found that people who do multitask, they do one thing and they do another thing, actually makes their productivity way worse than those people who do not. The people who do not are called single-taskers. You do single-tasking. You do one thing and you do one thing only. Because they found, you know, I just told you it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to prepare your brain to get back to where it was before, to go from one task to another task, you actually get what's called a cognitive switching penalty. Cognitive switching penalty, which means your brain is not going to be working at 100% when you switch from one thing to another to another to another to another to another. Right? Like if you're making a sandwich and listening to a podcast, not really a big deal. But if you're preparing a presentation and doing emails at the same time, your presentation and your emails are going to both be worse than if you were to just do one of them at a time. And so number three is to stop multitasking. Number four is to go old school and have a notepad and pen with you. And what you do is whenever you have any sort of ideas, if it's a to-do list, if it's a, you know, an amazing idea about something that you need to add to or a conversation you need to have with somebody, whatever it might be, you just write it down in pen and paper. And you just write it down. You don't put it in your phone because when you put it in your phone you can get distracted by other things. You write it down, you go old school, pen and paper. The good thing about that is when it's on pen and paper and you go back to whatever it is that you were doing, you come back to that pen and paper, you can actually use that pen and paper to now make a plan, right? And so I always say, like, if you're trying to figure out a complex math problem, it's really hard to figure it out in your head. But if you could get pen and paper, it makes it a lot easier. Well, if you're trying to figure out complex life decisions, business decisions, whatever it is that you need to do, it's going to be really hard to figure it out in your head. But if you can have a notepad, pen and paper with you, it makes it much easier to do that. And so number four is to make sure you have a notepad and pen close by at all times. Number five, my favorite one, put on headphones. Whenever you're trying to get focused, have headphones on and have a specific song that you listen to. I've been saying this for years, probably a bit about four years now. I listen to the exact same song every time I sit down to get focus work done. It is the exact same song. It is a three hour song that if you go onto YouTube and you search focus binarial beats, focus binarial beats on YouTube, it is the one that says focus on it and it is like a neon owl. I listen to that every single time. When I was planning today's podcast episodes, I listened to that song. I listened to it over and over again. There's no words to it. But I have actually started to classically condition my brain to when I hear that song, my brain is like, oh, yeah, that means we're about to focus. And so the same way that Pavlov, Pavlov's dogs, he would ring a bell and then they would give him a treat, ring a bell, give him a treat over and over and over and over again and eventually he rang a bell and their mouth would just salivate because their brain was actually expecting the treat right after. So I'm trying to do the exact same thing with my brain, with the sound of that song, literally telling my brain, okay, hey, now we're going into focus work. And number five is use headphones. Bring headphones with you everywhere. I always have my headphones with you. I always have my headphones with me and they are noise-canceling headphones so I can't hear almost anything else that's happening outside of my own head. That's number five. Number six is to use the Pomodoro technique. Super simple. I've said it a million times in this podcast. It is the best thing that I've ever found for getting focus work done. And that is 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. And in the Pomodoro technique, there's a lot and it's going to be in my book and my book comes out. There's a ton of different things that I have inside of this of research that they've done around the Pomodoro technique and why it works so well for humans. Like actually when you look at the neurobiology of humans and the way that we work, 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. In those 25 minutes, you do one task and one task only. You set a timer. I have a timer that's on my desk for 25 minutes and it goes off after 25 minutes and then you take a five minute break. In that five minute break, you don't look at your phone. You don't do any of that stuff. What you do is you go outside. You get some sun on your skin if you can. And you just kind of, you know, or what you do is you close your eyes for five minutes and just do some deep breathing. It's a whole lot of reasons why I don't have time to describe all the reasons why this works so well. But the Pomodoro technique is the best technique that psychologists have ever found for people to be focused on one thing to get a task done. You do one thing and one thing only. You bring 100% of your brain power to that one task for 25 minutes and then you take a five minute break. And you do three rounds of it, which is an hour and a half total. 25 minutes on, five minutes off, 25 minutes on, five minutes off, 25 minutes on, five minutes off. You do an hour and a half and then you take a 20 minute break and then you can go back into it. But in that Pomodoro technique, you can only focus on one task. If you have a big task, that might be the same task and just taking bite-sized pieces of that task each 25 minutes, okay? And number seven, this one is super important for you to be able to figure out your focus, okay? Is to rate your focus every hour on a scale of one to 10. So when you're trying to be productive, rate your focus on a scale of one to 10 every single hour. Therefore, you know what works and you also know what doesn't. You know what works, but you also know what doesn't. You also start to find out at what times of the day do I have the most focus and at what times of the day do I not have as much focus? And then what you can do is start to plan your day out depending on what your focus is like, depending on what your energy is like throughout the day. So like for me, I know that I always plan my podcast episodes when I have the time frame that I know I have the most focus throughout the day. And usually that's from about 11 o'clock until 2 p.m. And those three hours, if I'm going to plan out my podcast episodes, I want to bring 100% of my brain as much of my brain as I possibly can to that task. And so I don't do it at 9 o'clock at night when I'm tired and I've had a long day. I don't do it at 7 o'clock in the morning when I'm just chilling and wanting to read and wanting to journal instead. I do it when my brain has the most focus. When I personally, because you have different focus times throughout the day that are different than mine. So if you can figure out, just do this for a week, every hour, you know, from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m., you just have an alarm that goes off and you just rate your focus on a scale of 1 to 10, you're going to actually start to see patterns of when you have the most focus and when you have the least amount of focus and start to plan your day out depending on how much focus you have at certain times of the day. So that is how you be more focused. Those are the seven tips to be more focused. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. Please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at robdialjr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. I always love seeing how many of you guys share this every single day and how many people actually spread this message, which is awesome because whenever you guys share it, it allows more people who have never heard of this podcast to find it. So I would greatly, greatly appreciate it if you would share it. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way. I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.