Staying focussed

What's your biggest productivity challenge?

Computer games. Ipods. Iphones. Facebook. Friendster. YouTube. TV Drama series. Movies.

Be it all of the above or even the cosy duvet can make yourself turned into a couch potato, but still the reason behind this is simply because we're not staying focus. Generally, people find it difficult to stay focus in doing things that they ought to do. For some they have to study while others have to meet the deadlines of their projects or assignments etc.

I would like to take a classic example of what we, practising Muslims, do every single day which is the solah (the obligatory prayer). Let's see how Islam teaches us to become more focus in anything we do. Before we begin our solah, we are asked to fulfill our own personal needs first. For instance, if we need to go to the bathroom then we should do so, if we're so hungry better eat some food, if we need to change our dirty clothes we should do so etc. Also, make sure that the solah area is free from any distracting mechanisms and the environment is comfortable. So this is what we call as removing distractions and fulfilling personal needs in order for us to gain khusyu' (concentrate) when performing solah and our minds wouldn't wandering around elsewhere.

Another thing that we can learn through solah is we'll facing a single direction (the qiblah) or focus on one area which means we're focusing on one task at a time. Avoid doing multi-task in a short period of time say by doing lots of tasks in a second or in a single minute. A lot of time we're distracting ourselves by doing things other than the urgent and important things.

We also need to be aware with the task that we're doing. When we do sujud or ruku' we have tuma'ninah (pause for the duration of 1 tasbih at least) in every step of the prayer so that we are aware why we pray for. Being aware of what you do is definitely the primary steps in staying focus.

Let's see some practical steps to stay focus:

~give yourself a deadline

We tend to do more work the moment we know the deadline is near since we are all the 'lastminute.com people' (oh my, seems true to me) Reward yourself if the deadlines fulfilled and punish yourself for not fulfilling the task.

~the 10-minute rule

Set time say 10 minutes to do any task then break for 2 minutes (optional) in order to stay focus for another half an hour or longer just to get started.

I know it's easy said than done but it's not that hard really...yep insyaAllah I CAN!

(If you have any other tips to stay focus, do share it with me. I really need them now!)

It's all about learning from our beautiful religion to become more productive in the future insyaAllah. Let's be a productive Muslim! ^_^