The biggest reason people struggle to focus is that they don’t understand what focus really is.
Most of us think about focus like willpower — the effort you apply to keep your mind on one thing when it wants to go somewhere else. But this is only a tiny part of focus — and by far the least important.
The ability to focus deeply and for long stretches of time is the result of many habits cultivated over time.
If you want to produce great work, you need to master the art of focus. And to do that, you need to cultivate the right habits.
Here are 5 habits of highly focused people that will lead to deeper focus and outstanding results no matter what kind of work you’re doing.
1. Procrastinate productively
Truly productive people embrace procrastination rather than fight against it.
At first glance, the terms productive and procrastination would appear to be opposites. After all, one of the biggest reasons people cite for their difficulty focusing is the tendency to procrastinate.
But what if procrastination itself isn’t really the problem? What if the real problem is that people don’t know how to procrastinate the right way?