6.23.2010

How do I stay focused?

Focus - I struggle with the daily. In the Pixar movie "UP" that we watched recently the dogs in it are often easily distracted by SQUIRRELS.
I often feel the same way. I will be working on one thing and then an idea pops into my head and I work on that and then something distracts me, either a question or a phone call and I take care of that. Then I get another idea and work on that and end up very much off the original task. I struggle daily with staying focused at home and at work. Home is easier most of the time, because there are at least a few things that must be done on a daily basis. Those are feeding and putting X to bed. I am constantly aware of those tasks, because of his presence in the house and the time frame from when we get home to bedtime is only two hours. The other things that need done, like cleaning, will get halfway don and then I start something else. Though at times that something else is sitting on the couch and procrastinating.
At work I have a lot of freedom to set my own experiments and plan my day how I see fit to get my work completed. Generally speaking there are not many hard deadlines on most things. This makes procrastinating very easy. I do get my work accomplished and I do a good job, but often I find myself easily distracted. An example would be currently I need to be analyzing slides, but it is a tedious mindless task that takes a long time so I take frequent (perhaps too frequent) breaks to keep myself from falling asleep or going crazy. I do enjoy my job. I enjoy that I get to do very different things on different days from surgery and tissue collection to histology and data analysis. Often, though I end up doing weeks of one aspect of my job while all others fall to the wayside.

I am really going to try to focus on the task at hand instead of spending time fretting about the laundry and whats for dinner while at work and work while at home. I am pretty good at leaving work at work for the most part (though I will need to do some work this weekend), but as a way to escape everything we have just been coming home and watching movies. Granted with no A/C moving out of the direct line of the fan into the rest of the 87 degree house isn't the best plan. I hope once the air is back on we can start really living in our house again.

1 comment:

  1. I *loved* the movie "Up"...so many good lessons! And, I can totally relate to your short concentration span. Oh, and we recently were AC-less, and that sucked. We had fans going on all day, everywhere, in every corner of our apartment. Our dog didn't appreciate the heat either. It got fixed quickly, though. Hope yours will be fixed soon, too!

    ReplyDelete