Distracted Focus

Oxymoron”…For sure, but somehow the term is quite spot on, when it comes to summarizing most of the events in our life. There is no denying that life of a student in 21st century is the most complicated and distracted one. The information deluge in form of continuous communication and online consumption has made the FOCUS of our life a soft casualty. However, this seemingly insurmountable challenge can be tackled by bringing little modification in our daily life:

PURPOSE: Bringing clarity in everything that we do helps us immensely in deducing the primary purpose behind that activity. Therefore every night before going to bed, you should make it point to come up with at least a list of the three most important tasks that you plan to complete tomorrow. Because life is so much brighter when we focus on what truly matters.

GRATITUDE & POSITIVISM: Starting your day with these two powerful and reinforcing emotions can help you in bringing a bit of serenity in life. Rather than rushing through your daily chores, you should keep a dedicated slot, first thing in the morning, for doing something that you enjoy immensely,e.g singing, reading, running, walking or for that matter sitting idle and looking out of your window will also qualify for this activity, i.e anything but online communication or consumption.

BACKGROUND STUDY: To get the most out of priming technique, a student is expected to at least have gone through the chapters once that is scheduled for the day. A cursory perusal of the chapter should be enough to familiarize him with the frequent terminologies used in that chapter. And that is just enough to serve the purpose. Combine this strategy with the tri-fold method of note-taking.

STUDY GROUP: Gives you an opportunity to compare notes with other students. By comparing notes with others, you gain perspective and see what other students in the class found to be salient information. Collaborating and discussing topics covered in class not only helps you to better understand content for an upcoming test, but it also gives you valuable insight about other students. Quite often, notes become messy and disorganized because you are trying to keep up with the professor during the lecture. It is worth the additional time to rewrite your notes in a more organized way.

HOBBY/PLAY TIME: Most of you may be tempted to utilize this time for catching up with those communications that has gone into history. However you need to resist that temptation and delay till the completion of your schedule of outdoor play or hobby. You can treat it as a reward for your patience.

DEDICATED TIME FOR DAYDREAMING AND COMBINATORY PLAY: Combinatory Play is the process of taking unrelated things (thoughts, ideas, topics, images, disciplines, etc.) and putting them together to generate new, useful idea.
The best example of combinatory play is E=mc2. Einstein took the concepts of energy, mass and the speed of light and combined them together, which enabled him to look at the universe in a different way. Even Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press embodied this combinatorial creativity. What we call “intuition” is based on the unconscious application of this very mental faculty. So as a student how do you practice this on daily basis? Simply let your imagination go wild without restriction of plausible reasoning. You just need to develop the taste for it.
Once you start repeating these steps everysingle day, it would automatically get traslated into a habit. As a result your FOCUS woud no longer be a distracted one.

Before concluding, I would like to remind you all that life is nothing but a sum total of all the days lived by you. And the best part is you get to live it day by day as a present. So please put your best effort to make every day count.

An amazing quote by Seneca sums it up beautifully “People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy”.

Please do leave your valuable comments. And if you do like the post, feel free to share it with your friends. Thanks a ton for your encouragement and support.