Jolt!, Phil Cooke [reading women txt] 📗

connected to the fact that I’ve always been easily distracted, but believe me, I can juggle a lot and survive. Focusing was always a little difficult for me, so I made up for it by doing a ton of different things all at once. I could answer e-mail, make phone calls, finish a TV script, and organize my desk at the same time without even thinking about it. In fact, I could juggle at that pace for hours without a second thought.

But then I noticed some interesting research that indicated multitasking wasn’t as productive as it seemed. In fact, balancing multiple tasks and juggling projects was far less successful than I thought. I learned that when people like me multitask, we make many more mistakes and often end up taking even longer to correct those mistakes.

That’s when I started researching the power of focus—doing one task at a time and doing it really well. In a digital age, it doesn’t seem quite as fashionable, but the more I study it, the more I learn the benefits of this little-used skill.

» FOCUS ALLOWS YOU TO TAKE CONTROL OF ALL YOUR SKILLS, INTELLIGENCE, AND RESOURCES AND PUT THEM TO WORK ON YOUR IMMEDIATE PROBLEM.

Instead of doing five tasks relatively well, or with average skill, focus allows you to turn all that energy and effort into doing one thing at the peak of your abilities. And the results can be absolutely amazing.

This very book was delayed because of my initial lack of focus. I’ve had this information inside me for years, but I continued to allow distractions to take me off course. Running two companies, consulting with numerous organizations, directing commercials and television programs—all pulled my attention away from the real dream of helping people through the power of change. As a result, for the longest time I would only work on the book in small snippets of time stolen away from other tasks and projects. I would either wake up early in the morning to write for a few hours, or grab a few minutes before bed. I actually wrote the last chapter on an airline flight between Atlanta and Los Angeles. As a result, I was writing as many as four different chapters at the same time. A few paragraphs here, a few there, and then I would shift to another section of the book when something else came to mind.

In this culture, where multitasking is prized above all things, I should have probably won some award for juggling my normal routine and then finding fragments of time to write a book. But I finally realized that it wasn’t just my schedule that was becoming fragmented; the book was fragmented as well. As I read my rough drafts, I discovered that any sense of overall direction, theme, or sense of completeness was lacking. The book had snippets of good information but was lacking any real depth and wholeness.

So I decided to focus. I redesigned my schedule so that I could focus the time, energy, and effort on completing the book. I threw out the incomplete sections and started devoting more time (undistracted time) to the writing process. I shut the door, refused to answer the phone during certain parts of the day, and started to focus on writing.

When that happened, I noticed something amazing. The focus allowed me to go deep.

SLEEP RESEARCH AND THE POWER OF FOCUS

It was much like what researchers have discovered about REM sleep. In our sleep patterns we desperately need time in our REM sleep. It’s where we dream and how we recover from the day. Scientists have discovered that skipping this most productive stage of sleep has devastating results.

Researchers have conflicting ideas about why we dream during REM sleep, but one of the theories is particularly compelling to me. Some scientists believe that dreaming allows our subconscious minds to “sort through” the experiences, thoughts, and ideas that have been floating around and helps us “connect the dots” or put them all into perspective. That would explain why our dreams mix and match various experiences—even though they make no sense on the surface. Perhaps our subconscious is trying to sort things out— putting experiences into a perspective that we would never consider with our conscious minds. The result has fascinated us since the beginning of time and spawned all kinds of dream interpretation theories, occult practices, mediums, and wacko ideas.

» SLEEP ON IT.

This research has also given credence to the old phrase “Sleep on it.” My mother (and most likely yours as well) always told me to “sleep on it” when I was wrestling with a problem, challenge, or dilemma for which I just couldn’t find the answer.

Guess what? Mom may just have been right. (Just as with a million other things.)

Researchers today believe that when we have a difficult problem for which we need an answer, if we’ll think on the problem right before bedtime, our subconscious minds can work it out. In Newsweek magazine’s feature story, “What Dreams Are Made Of,” writers Barbara Kantrowitz and Karen Springen, with Pat Wingert and Josh Ulick, report evidence that dreaming helps certain types of learning:

Some researchers have found that dreaming about physical tasks, like a gymnast’s floor routine, enhances performance. Dreaming can also help people find solutions to elusive problems. “Anything that is very visual may get extra help from dreams,” says Deirdre Barrett, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and editor of the journal Dreaming. In her book The Committee of Sleep, she describes how artists like Jasper Johns and Salvador Dali found inspiration in their dreams. In her own research on problem solving through dreams, Barrett has found that even ordinary people can solve simple problems in their lives (like how to fit old furniture into a new apartment) if they focus on the dilemma before they fall asleep.

One way I use dreams is by keeping a notebook on the side of the bed. I’ll often wake up in the middle of the night with