I recently finished up Find Your Focus Zone: An Effective New Plan to Defeat Distraction and Overload by Lucy Jo Palladino. While it got great reviews on Amazon, I don’t recommend it. I was expecting a lot more detailed and thorough strategies and exercises to combat distraction. I guess every author comes up with some kind of analogy to build a theme around. She categorized strategies as keychains and keys, which at multiple points I found very confusing and distracting.
As with all other advice out there, the premise is to be self-aware and mindful. I don’t mean to belittle that point as it’s essential to change and improve anything (focus, weight loss, attitude, etc).
At some point on this blog, I’m going to put together a nice concise plan and advice to combat distraction. Duh, that’s the point, right?
The long story short of this book is to be mindful of your adrenaline levels. To help, you can try to visualize it on a scale of 1-10. If you are bored (adrenaline level low), and need to take on a boring task, you should look to raise the level (music, power walk, thoughts, etc). If you are too hyped up, you may need to calm down too. The idea is to find the right balance, or “zone”. HOW to get in the zone is completely left out of the book–or at least it completely escaped me. Rather the book gets you to be aware that there is a zone and has you strive to get in the zone.
There were some takeaways though, so it wasn’t a waste of time for me to read:
- To combat avoidance (procrastination), ask “what am I NOT doing now?” And why…
- Envision anxiety as a false alarm and ask is it rational.
- Focus on what you can control.
- Let goals guide you, not govern you.
- When you notice you are losing focus, ask why.
- To combat overload, don’t have FOMA – Fear of Missing Out
I can see why this book may be helpful to some. Like I’m sure with a lot of books, they can be either great or not depending on where you are with your knowledge of the subject at the moment.