Ex-googler teaches jedi focus at sTARTUp Day

1. Mindfulness. It´s simply being aware and present. The most important part that mindfulness plays in productivity is that it allows us a little space to choose how we respond to external things, e.g. how we want to respond to an e-mail or what a client just told us.

Attention training. It is otherwise known as mindfulness meditation. The mind is very much a muscle which you can train. We all know how important it is to train our bodies. We eat well, we sleep well, but many of us are forgetting that the mind can also be trained, you can become more skilful in using your mind.

2. Jedi focus. 69% of workers have difficulties focusing on one thing at a time. It takes 25% more time to finish a task when you’re multitasking as opposed to single-tasking. Harvard research shows that it takes 15 minutes to come back to the original task after you’ve been interrupted. Achieving jedi focus is tough.

He suggested a simple but effective tool called „One Big Thing.“ It is about picking the most important piece of work every day that you need to get done and make that the first thing you do the following day. Make that task about 60 minutes at least. Anything less than that and it won’t feel as important. But no more than 90 minutes or 2 hours, because after that amount of time attention energy starts to fade. With this method you build a sense of achievement once you´ve done that one big thing during the day.

I fyou want to achieve focus, then you need to practice single-tasking and doing nothing else but one task at a time. After practicing for a while you’ll be able to sit down for 90 minutes and focus on just one thing. It’s common knowledge, it’s just not common practice.

Dont rely on willpower, use friction, he said.