How to Get Your Brain to Focus on What Matters
Researchers have shown that website visitors have learned to ignore banner ads.
Known as “banner blindness”, this phenomenon is essentially saying that the more you read articles online the more you learn to ignore the irrelevant or unimportant pieces of the experience.
This basic idea – that you can focus on one part of an experience and ignore others – is a cognitive psychology concept known as selective attention.
Selective attention helps you filter out the noise and focus on the signal.
The same concept can be applied to work and productivity.
To figure out what works and what doesn‘t, you need to measure your results. Repeat the cycle many times and you end up becoming very good at focusing on the things that matter and ignoring the ones that don‘t.
If you want to get better, then practice consistently and measure constantly. Use that feedback to figure out what is working and what isn‘t. Then, spend your time putting in more reps rather than searching for another hack.
Experts spend more time focusing on what works.
And the only way to know what works is to put the time in.