How to Feed Your Focus and Improve Efficiency

Truly productive people feed their focus and starve their distractions

Many people have a real plan to get important stuff done - they are not necessarily lazy. They just don’t know how to stop feeding their distractions.

Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, argues that focus is the new I.Q. He says people who "cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive" in the new world of work.

4 tips how to study effectively

1. Focus on constructing your own understanding of a topic, not reproducing someone else’s

In the "Need to Know" section above, we noted that memory is fundamentally reconstructive, as opposed to reproductive, in nature. If you rely on passively rereading your course materials, you’ll tend to end up using your memory to try to reproduce the author’s understanding of the subject rather than generating your own. So, what is the best catalyst for generating your own understanding of what you read? The answer is to question what you read as you’re reading it. By responding to your own questions, you are forcing yourself to think about how to explain the subject matter in your own words and with reference to your previous knowledge and experience.