Friday Feature: FOCUS

Photo: clconroy via Morguefile

Are you one of those amazing people who sits down to begin a task and keeps at it until it's finished? Do you manage to get from start to finish without any interruptions or distractions?

Then this week's article isn't for you.

But if you, like the rest of us, find that your path from Point A to Point B is more often jagged than linear, you might want to check out Next Avenue's 8 Ways to Beat Work Distractions and Be More Productive. A compilation of ideas from a workshop by Sam Horn and Danielle Faust, the piece offers tips on conquering work woes from persistence to procrastination.

I have only one complaint: I wish the article wasn't so prominently peppered with links to other relevant articles. Good for the web site and bad for the distractible reader -- which is actually kind of ironic.

I had to read the Jerry Seinfeld link. How about you?

To Sleep, Perchance to be Productive

I slept in on Saturday. By the time I got out of bed, it was late enough to be "too late" by post-college grad standards, but not so late as to have become completely embarrassing.

I'm very good at berating myself when I think I've slept too late. So, to put things into perspective, I add eight hours to the time I went to bed to see if I'm as lazy as I fear a I am. It's rare that the time I get up actually exceeds that time frame; most days, it falls woefully short.

But on Saturday, it was a pretty close match. I actually got close to eight hours of sleep.

Once I was up, I kicked into high gear, and you know what? Saturday turned to to be a very productive day. Even without a nap.

Photo: kakisky via Morguefile

I've read a lot about sleep, some of it fact, some of it questionable. I know that sleep is essential to effective functioning, and that most of us who think we're operating at peak capacity have no idea what peak capacity really is. I've read that lack of sleep messes with our endocrine system, and contributes to obesity. I've also read that people who sleep later have higher IQs than those who rise early. That article even cited my default body clock (to bed around 1, up around 8) as common in that group, but I'm pretty sure I read that one on Facebook so I doubt it counts.

But for me, Saturday was verification of the first information tidbit. On several occasions throughout the day, I caught myself thinking, "So this is what enough sleep feels like." The correlation between sleep and productivity -- for me, on this one day, anyway -- was unmistakable.

I wish I could say I learned a life lesson and repeated the drill yesterday, but that's not true. Once again, my body clock and the plans we'd made were on different schedules, leaving me sleep deprived early in the day and leading into a Monday that, even by noon, felt a tad off-kilter.

So much for peak efficiency. Then again, it is Monday.