How to Stay Focused in a Distraction-Filled World
God Has Good Works for You
We don’t realize that a lot of the time we set ourselves up for failure. We have our phones that open a thousand possibilities for us to do a thousand different things at every moment of every day. But God has set good works for us. He has prepared things to do right now. So we need to block off all other things that impede us to actually focus on the thing that God has called us to do.
And this is difficult because we’ve spent years—if we have had a couple of years with phones—training ourselves that at the slightest discomfort with the task we have before us, we just run away and get distracted and entertain through our phones or through some streaming service. And we don’t realize that that actually trains our minds to create that distraction.
Make the Most of Your Productivity
Ana Ávila
In this user-friendly guide, Ana Ávila teaches 6 principles to help you honor God with all you have and reflect his character through your creativity.
So a great way to stop doing that is to cut off those distractions for a little while. At the beginning, start with five minutes. Let’s do some uninterrupted reading for five minutes. It’s going to be hard, but attention is sort of like a muscle. We need to practice to sustain it more and more. You wouldn’t go to the gym and just lift the heaviest of weights on your first day there. You would start small and then be consistent and constantly improving. So it’s the same way with attention.
Every day just block off time where you shut off the distractions and you focus on one single task, and then you go from five minutes to ten minutes, then to fifteen, then half an hour, maybe an hour. That would make your brain power so much stronger if you constantly do it. But remember, every time you choose distraction, you’re training yourself to be more and more distracted.
Ana Ávila is the author of Make the Most of Your Productivity: A Guide to Honoring God with Your Time.
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