Train Your Brain to Stay Focused on Blogging Tasks

Lori Soard

You’ve probably heard the latest studies that multitasking may not be as productive as people once thought it was. According to an article on Entrepreneur, our brains hone in on distractions. The brain grabs our attention because the distraction signals change and change can signal danger.

David Rock, the co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute states that multitasking drops a person’s IQ. We love the feeling of multitasking, too. Our brains get excited over multitasking, but this is not the most efficient way to work.

Studies have found that doing more than one task at a time splits the brain. In one study in Paris, participants were asked to complete two tasks at the same time. The brain activity divided in half to try to complete both tasks. When a third task was thrown into the mix, participants in the study forgot one of the tasks they’d been asked to perform and made three times as many errors.

The University of Queensland scientists found that in addition to not being as effective at completing multiple tasks at one time, that doing more than one task made the work far less satisfying than when study participants were able to focus on a single goal and complete it to their satisfaction.

However, there is some recent evidence to suggest that multitasking can work when you’ve been trained to do both tasks simultaneously. Still, researchers suggest trying to avoid multitasking when possible.

The moral? The more tasks you are trying to complete at once, the less effective you are at any given task. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to train your brain to stay focused on a single task and avoid the trap of keeping so many different tabs open on your computer screen and in your brain.

Learn to Stay Focused

National Public Radio recently reported on the University of Michigan using an MRI scanner to monitor the brain activity of test subjects doing different tasks. One thing that researcher Daniel Weissman (a neuroscientist) found was that when the subjects went from one task to the next, that the brain had to pause and gather up what it knew of that task before moving on to the action that needed to be taken.

This could mean that we aren’t really multitasking even when we think we are. Instead, we are just shifting rapidly from one task to the next, but in the time it takes our brains to process the task, we have lost precious seconds of time.

Learning to stay focused can mean the difference between meeting important deadlines and missing them. There are many ways to stay focused.

Use a Checklist of Blogging Tasks

One thing that is helpful for many people is to create a checklist of things that need to be completed. When it comes to blogging, there are some tasks that need to be completed regularly. Here are a few of the things you should add to your list, but of course the list will become very specific based on the needs of your site.

• Schedule new posts.
  
• Edit and freshen up old posts.
  
• Run updates on plugins, themes and WP itself.
  
• Fix typos and improve content
  
• Promote posts on social media
  
• Respond to comments

Get Creative Tasks Done First

In the Entrepreneur article mentioned above, David Rock also says that people should complete the most creative tasks first. Most people turn to easy tasks that don’t require a lot of thought, but this is backwards. Instead, try to work on the tasks that require a lot of thought and creativity first. Then, if you’re tired and drained, you can work on the mindless tasks and not lose much productivity.

Figure Out Your Most Creative Time

Some people are extremely creative in the mornings. Some are extremely creative at night. Figure out what time of day you are most productive and creative and make sure you set aside a block of time to work when you’re at your best.

Practice Concentrating

If you’ve been multitasking for a while, you’ve trained your brain not to focus on a single task. It can take practice to learn to focus on one task at a time. Spend five minutes at a time focusing on one thing at first. Increase that time slowly.

Remove Distractions

One of the main reasons we have trouble focusing is that there are so many distractions in our lives. The cell phone rings, Facebook messenger dings and you are trying to finish a blog post. You may even have the television or music on in the background and your brain is trying to focus on that as well. Remove all those distractions and focus on one thing at a time instead.

Find a Place

Sometimes, learning how to focus means finding the best place to work distraction-free. This might be a home office, a quiet room in your home or even the local coffee shop. Some entrepreneurs choose to rent office space for at least a couple days a week, so they can truly focus on getting work done without the many distractions of working from home.

Juggle the Many Blogging Issues that Crop Up

Blogging itself seems to invite multitasking. There are so many issues that crop up that have to be handled. For example, you may suddenly have spammers hit your site and need to delete those spam comments. Perhaps there are comments that require a response. Maybe hackers take your entire site down.

The key to sticking to a schedule is to keep a to-do list at hand and to not deviate from it except for the most severe of emergencies. For example, if hackers take your site down, that takes priority over writing the next blog post. However, if there are simply comments to respond to, those can wait until you finish your blog posts on your to-do list.

Training yourself to focus and be more productive isn’t necessarily easy, but the productivity you’ll discover will make it worth your time and effort.

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