8 Distractions You Can Ditch Today for Better Focus

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 237. You know, sometimes podcast episodes are delightfully simple to put together, and today's episode was one of those delightful episodes for me. I just put together my thoughts on what I've been noticing in my own life and in the lives of my clients. And I put together a short list of the things that I've noticed people doing and myself included that equal distraction. And so I thought I would just share the list so you could do a review of your own behavior, your own schedule, your own habits, and see can I get rid of one or two of these items so that I can up my focus, save myself lots of time, and end up being much more joyful at the end of the day? Let's go listen to this episode with eight tips that are really great for you now.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:04]:
Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body, and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:47]:
Hi, there it is me again. And today we're going to have a really fun time because I have a list of things that you may be doing that might be be causing you to get distracted from the things you really want to be doing or you really should be doing or the things that are really important to you. And the reason why this is going to be fun is because I'm going to tell you a lot of stories about how I do these very things. And the great news about this list that I have for you is that I think every single thing on the list is something that you can stop doing very quickly. I think it's the fact that we don't realize that some of these things are distracting to us, that keep these things, these behavior patterns from leaving us. So we just keep them around because we're thinking, oh, this isn't really doing any harm. This is just me thinking about things. And I'm going to just identify and be really clear about the eight things that I've thought about, because keeping an eye on these eight things has really Helped me to be so much more focused, so much more calm, so much more productive, and a lot less distracted.

Dr. Christine Li [00:03:07]:
So let's start in right now. The first topic that I have for you is comparison. I don't talk a lot about comparison on this podcast because I think for me, it's such an old, bygone type of topic. For me, I used to be someone who compared everything. How am I doing? Am I going too slowly compared to this person? Oh, look at what they're doing. And I think getting rid of comparison was just the biggest favor I've ever done for myself. Because comparing yourself to other people is just, I think, by definition, a huge distraction. Because no matter how relevant you think what that other person is doing, that person is doing that thing for their life.

Dr. Christine Li [00:04:02]:
They're not doing it to make you feel badly or to make you go more slowly or to get you out of the race. There's no race. It's just your life that we're talking about. So why would you compare yourself to person X, Y, or Z? Because they're living X, Y, and Z life. They're not living your life. So I decided to put this particular item as the top of my list because I think this is something you could literally stop doing today. And you're gonna feel like you've given yourself the biggest gift to say, you know what? What I do and what I choose to do and how I do things matters. And I don't have to dumb myself down or compare myself negatively to anyone else.

Dr. Christine Li [00:04:49]:
No matter how things are going for me, I can just keep my eyes on my own page or project or life. It's going to be so freeing when you get there. All right, item number two is this interesting thing that we do, which is counting time. I used to do this constantly. I would say to myself, oh, my God, I can't believe I have wasted six weeks on this. Oh, my God. I only have half an hour left. And I got to a certain point in my life where I realized that even that one minute that I'm spending on counting how much time I have wasted or how much time I have left is a waste of time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:05:34]:
Now you can say, oh, that helps me to get motivated. And I do think that used to help me get motivated, but now I just feel motivated. Instead of having to pressure myself into getting motivated because I'm chasing time or because I've lost so much time, I no longer choose to be productive on a foundation of bad things and bad thoughts and bad behavior, I now choose to be Productive because I feel naturally motivated, because I've allowed myself enough time, because I have projects that I really care about and are inspired by. And I feel like if I could get one person today, one listener, to transfer from the negative platform of doing things to the positive and kind of and generous platform of doing things, I will have succeeded. And I think I'm probably helping to convert way more than one person. I'm crossing my fingers on that one. All right, so avoid spending your time thinking about how much time you're losing or that you've lost. The third item you've heard me talk about a lot on this podcast, and that is physical clutter.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:50]:
Over the past two or three days, I've been really pushing forward with my own clutter. You may know that I teach hundreds and thousands of people about how to do decluttering quickly and without anxiety, pain, or dread. And this is where sometimes the teacher needs their own lesson. And lately I've been saying to myself, you know what? I really want my bedroom to be minimalist. You don't have to have your bedroom minimalist. But. But I'm almost there. So I'm thinking to myself over the past couple of days, let's just do the last four bins.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:29]:
And I've put that on TikTok. It's been really fun. It's been really gratifying because, remember, every time we declutter, we feel lighter, we feel proud of ourselves. We feel that much closer to an uncluttered, non distracting space. So if you have any physical clutter, maybe do one bin today. Just because you heard this podcast, just because you can, and just because it won't take as much time or energy as you think it will. And even if it does take a little bit of time and energy, you're going to get your space back. You're going to get a rush of lightness from the decluttering effort.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:12]:
So you can turn this one around today, guaranteed. Item number four that I have for you is the distracting behavior of thinking about what you don't want to have happen. This we do innocently. We say to ourselves, oh, I don't want to bother that person. Oh, I don't want to overstep. Oh, I don't want to make any mistakes. The thing is, that's all great and we're all really well intentioned. We need to start with that as the baseline understanding of who we are.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:44]:
But when we spend a lot of our energy thinking and daydreaming about what we don't want to have happen I'm going to say we're distracting ourselves from moving forward. We are taking our precious time and energy away from saying, you know what? I'm going to go introduce myself to that person today. You know what? I'm going to apply to four jobs today. Instead of thinking that I don't want to burn my energy too quickly today, you're just going to try for what you want instead of hemming and hawing and worrying about what you don't want to see in your life. Of course you don't want to see certain things. These things are assumed. Let's just assume you know what you don't want to see and let's go for what you're going to create, what you're going to get for yourself, what you're going to accomplish, what you're going to let go of. Maybe it's that bin of clutter, right? Save yourself that time, regain your focus, but focus on what you want, not on what you don't want.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:45]:
That one's important, so I just want to put a star on that one. Number five is very close, like a cousin to tip number four, which was don't think about what you don't want. Tip number five is don't spend your time thinking about how horrible, how enormous, how depleting the next thing on your list is going to be. So basically, don't scare yourself because scaring yourself doesn't really help you do anything. And it generally is not only distracting to you because it's not helping you kind of solve the problem or do the thing in front of you. It's. It's causing you to freeze. It's causing you to say, you know what? I'm too smart to do things that will make me feel terrible, horrible, insufficient, or unwell.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:41]:
And so we want to basically eliminate this whole layer of thinking, which is the layer of thinking that things are going to be so gigantic or terrifying or dangerous for our sense of safety. And we're going to just think that everything is fine and that we are fine and that we are enough and that we've lots of support, we've got lots of time, we've got great weather lately. So let's go, let's focus, let's not be distracted. We can say this to ourselves and then click into action. The sixth item on the list is a very simple thing, but it's a simple thing that we oftentimes don't do for ourselves. Some of you listening may be great at this particular tip. And the tip is to set a Plan for your day. Today happens to be a day where I went fully in with a whole plan about how I was going to write my entire day out, what was on my mind, what I needed to get done, what I was proud of myself for doing, and what I even wanted to get accomplished this weekend.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:49]:
Because I am recording this on a Friday afternoon, and I have to tell you, this is the personal story coming. This was such a fantastic morning and afternoon because I did that. I wrote down my thoughts. I wrote down the journaling kind of content. Then I wrote down probably 13 or 14 things that I felt like I needed to get done today. And then I went to town. I did probably seven or eight things. One of them was easy, like ordering something off Amazon.

Dr. Christine Li [00:12:21]:
You know how to do that. We all know how to do that. It happened in, like, five minutes. And I've been delaying purchasing that item for a little while now, and it was gone in. In minutes. And so the tip really is to get organized with what you're doing. Instead of allowing your daydreams to take over and your time to fritter away. We can get really specific about what we want to use our time for ahead of time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:12:48]:
I suggest the morning. You might want to do this the night before. That's fine. But for me, it just worked out so beautifully. This morning when I was feeling fresh, I had just come from the gym. I already felt proud of myself for going to the gym, and it was a beautiful day. So I did this planning outside, and then I just jammed with that to do list today. So if you are not planning, if you're not getting clear on your intentions for the day, it may be that you're opening yourself up for unnecessary distraction time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:13:20]:
Right? You start veering off into here. You start baking instead of doing the stuff that you actually wanted to do. No offense to the bakers, Baking is beautiful, but be intentional about when you want to do the baking so that you can really enjoy it instead of thinking, oh, I baked this, but I didn't get to do the things that really would have made a difference in my life. All right, so on to tip number seven. A big topic, and that is being perfectionistic. I tend not to be perfectionistic. I tend to be the person who's just trying to get things done, trying to move the to do list along. But I do want to put perfectionism on this list, because perfectionism can distract you from the fact that you're so close to doing all the things that you need to do.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:09]:
You. You could have so much of your time back, you could feel a whole lot less stressed than you might be day after day after day. Can you imagine being productive without feeling like you're on the line for something, like you're about to be judged for being perfect or not perfect. And that is my recent self project. I am trying to get comfortable with having my days be slower, being more mindful about things without being so stressed. I think I really like to be accomplished and to do things and to get things done. But sometimes I feel that puts me in this kind of hamster wheel and I want to do less of the hamster wheel. So I am trying to just get comfortable with things being the way they are, with doing what I can, keeping my flow.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:05]:
And I'm just going to advise that if you happen to be more of the perfectionistic type that you try this on for size, see if it works for you. Take next week as an experiment week, right? Maybe you plan in the morning, maybe you do the hydration, maybe you get all the minor chores out right away. And then you leave yourself all this time to just say, you know what, I'm going to do this, but I'm going to finish when I think this is enough, instead of saying I'm going to do this for hours and hours until I can't take it anymore. And I know everything is perfect because I think there's a real difference in the two styles of working. The last thing that I have on my list today for you, tip number eight is letting time go by. So this is different than counting time, which was tip number two. This is just thinking that you're going to do something, but then 3 o' clock goes by, 4 o' clock goes by, 5 o' clock goes by. And you don't ever just push the go button.

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:12]:
You never really jump in and say, you know what, before it gets to 4 o' clock, I'm starting this. And just envision yourself as having an on button because you really do, right? If you really needed to do things like there was no out, you would use that on button. If you had to get on stage and it was pre planned and you had an audience ready to hear you, you would use that on button. Transfer that on button to your daily life. Use it whenever you need to to rescue the time that is going by so that you don't get distracted. And then all of a sudden be at the end of the day thinking, oh, I have to stay up past midnight because I didn't really use my time to. During the day. We want to preserve our good sleep.

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:58]:
We want to get things done during the day. We want to end the day feeling accomplished or like we tried. We gave our best efforts. And I think using this list of 8 things that you might be distracting yourself with and getting rid of some of them, maybe just two or three, is going to help you feel like I'm going to get to bed. I'm so happy with how today went and I wish that for all of you. Because happiness is the end goal for most everyone and you deserve every bit of it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode on how to avoid Getting Distracted all the Time. If you'd like a free download to help you remember these eight items, I'm happy to share the link with you now.

Dr. Christine Li [00:17:45]:
It is maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/distraction again. It is maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/distraction and once you go to that link, you'll get an email with the download tucked away inside that email and you'll be able to get on your way again. Thanks again for being here. I'll see you next week.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:13]:
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also Visit our website maketime4successpodcast.com for past episodes, show notes, and all the resources we mention on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name Procrastination Coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are are about the episodes you've been listening to and let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making Time for Success. Talk to you soon.