How to Focus at Work During the Summer and Avoid Distractions

Posted July 18, 2015 & filed under Productivity, Work Environment

Summer can make us all want to be outside at the pool or spending time outdoors with family and friends. This time of year makes people want to be lazier than normal. Think about it. It is hard to resist hanging by the pool without a care in the world. But, let’s be real. We have jobs and responsibilities to our work. ABC News in Cleveland recently published an online article on this topic.  ABC says in the article, “While it can be a challenge (to focus on work during the Summer), experts say there are some things we can do to stop distractions and refocus during the summer season.” So what are these tips they experts have come up with? What will make us all more focused on work even with the many distractions that summer brings?  They say in the article that the first thing to do is “Stop thinking about yourself.”

An expert quoted in the article, Dr. Scott Bea, a clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, says, “He starts thinking about himself too much rather than just see the ball and hit it. And whenever we get overly involved with our thoughts, we lose sight of what’s happening in the here and now.” Dr. Bea recommends introducing new pictures to your desk area regularly, of family and friends and pets, so you don’t get used to them, and he also suggests that you take a walk when you’re having trouble concentrating, or just look out the window to refocus. He calls this refocusing concept “refreshing your personal homepage” and he uses the idea of finishing a crossword puzzle to highlight this refreshing your personal homepage. Dr. Bea makes this crossword puzzle analogy saying, “Think about the time you’re working on a crossword…you get a little stumped, if you step away from that for just a few moments it frees up your thinking. You can come back and all of a sudden the answer that was not available to you is available to you. So there are a lot of psychological and productivity benefits to getting your brain off yourself.”