How To Stay Focused At Work – 89 Proven Focus Tips

We’ve all been there. You show up at the desk, the whole day’s ahead of you, but you can’t figure out how to stay focused at work for an hour or two.

It can be particularly challenging to keep your concentration focused on a task, especially if you work online.

Whether it’s decision fatigue, bad habits, lack of motivation, or something else entirely, your inability to focus burns a hole into your productivity and you are not able to get things done consistently.

Not everything works for everyone. That’s why we gathered more than 80 tips that will help you to stay focused while studying, writing a paper, reading a book, or doing any work online.

Learn How to Stay Focused in the Office and When You Work at Home

You have probably heard some of them, but you might have missed some easy to implement ways to stay focused because you never thought about them. Just adding a few of these productivity tools to your arsenal will help you to feel more alert, be attentive at work and boost your concentration without reading dozens of books that try to teach you “to stay focused.”

You will learn easy and simple to implement ways to avoid distractions, design your environment, take care of your body and train your brain to focus. These tips go way beyond the typical “Eat the frog” and take regular breaks. (Although you’ll find them in this list as well).To get started browse through the tips and find something that you can do today. Just pick an area where you feel you’ll get the most bang for your buck.

How To Stay Focused On Your Goals

It’s important to remind yourself of what you’re working towards. Having a goal in mind will fuel your motivation to finish your work, push through when you feel tired, and stay focused on a long term goal.

Before you go to sleep, clear your mind and make some basic decisions about what you will do tomorrow.

For longer time frames pinpoint a specific goal you can work towards. It’s easy to get lost in a distracting series of small tasks if you’re not working towards a meaningful, large goal.

When you have a goal to work towards, it can be the carrot at the end of the stick that makes the task worth doing. There is a reason why I mention this point at the beginning of this article.

It’s merely the most important one. If you want to stay focused, you must be specific and have a time slot for absolutely everything.

There are many ways to do this. To stick with this routine, I recommend the method that you are most comfortable with.

One of the biggest failures I’ve seen (and committed myself) was to create a complicated time management system that I abandoned one or two weeks later because it was too complicated.

You can use a one-page productivity planner, some journal or one of the many ToDo-List and Calendar apps out there.

It does not matter which method you choose.

These are the options that are proven to work for many people: The most important thing is that you have a look at your plan before you start to work and when you finish your work.

Try to use the same system — every single day. Jim Rohn once said:

“Don’t start the day until it is pretty well finished — at least the outline of the day. Leave some room to improvise. Leave some room for extra strategies, but finish it before you start it.”

Jim Rohn

To boost your focus choose ONE from the variety of systems that are available on the market and STICK with it.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in the past was switching between all those systems. Don’t make the same mistake.

There are many options you can choose from. Research suggests that handwriting activates different, critical areas of the brain than typing. That’s why one of my best tips to stay focused at work is to use a least one analog way of planning.

Traditional Methods To Plan Your Day

Especially if you have a hard time focusing at work I recommend to write things down on a piece of paper. 

Use A Simple Piece of Paper 

The best format to use a simple piece of paper is the format I found on Neville Medhora’s blog. His to-do lists have morphed many times over the years until he found this method that works for him. It’s only a pen and paper. It’s important to notice that he only plans his tasks THE DAY BEFORE. He rarely ever adds on work for the same day. (He claims that the way he stays sane).

Use A Simple Calendar 

Probably you already have something like this. You’ll often get one for free from various companies for free.

Use A Moleskine Book / Diary

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying fundamentals. One thing to keep track of the fundamentals is to write things down. If you still doubt if this is the right approach for you I recommend to read the blog post Can A $2-Tool Make You A Millionaire?

Use A Formatted Journal

Planning is not something that comes naturally for many people. Even those who love to plan need the right system to ensure that they are getting the most from their planning. That’s why many experts created a structured journal to boost focus. These often contain additional prompts to help you focus on all aspects of your life.

Choose one of these if you like to follow a proven format. 

THE FREEDOM JOURNAL – Accomplish your #1 goal in 100 days

John Lee Dumas created this journal. On his podcast Entrepreneur on fire, he has interviewed over 2000 successful Entrepreneurs. The journal is his step-by-step process to guide you in setting and accomplishing your #1 goal in 100 days.You will establish an action plan every day. At the end of the day, the journal helps you to review your wins and losses. It contains 10-DAY Sprints to accomplish ten micro-goals and quarterly reviews to identify obstacles and adjust.

The Bullet Journal

The bullet journal is a planner system devised by Ryder Carrol. It’s a blank journal that contains a combination of different elements like the other planners mentioned here as well. It includes an index, monthlies, dailies, collections, and a future log. Basically, any blank journal can become a bullet journal. The original trademarked Bullet Journal includes an 8-page guide that will teach you everything you need to get started. You can watch this video to get an overview of Ryder’s system.

The Phoenix Journal

The Phoenix Journal is a quarterly planner with a full page for note-taking and journaling for every day. My friend Mitchell McBrayer created it. Feel free to list to my podcast episode “How Daily And Weekly Planning Will Burn Away Your Bad Habits And Transform Your Life” with him. The Phoenix Journal tries to provide the perfect balance between freedom and structure. Plan your day, reflect, take notes and journal all in one place.

The Full Focus Planner

Just like the other planner, The Full Focus Planner® exists as the perfect intersection of annual goal-setting and daily productivity. Leadership expert and bestselling author Michael Hyatt created it, to offer a tactical solution for acting on your highest priorities, both day-to-day and year-to-year. Michael Hyatt wants to help you to fuel your high-achieving lifestyle so that you can accomplish your biggest priorities without overwhelm and distraction.

The High-Performance Planner 

Brendon Burchard’s planner is combination of a planner and journal to increase your performance via writing prompts, self-assessments, and calendars all backed by science and the author’s 20 years coaching the highest performers in business, athletics, entertainment, and beyond.

The High-Performance Planner is a 2-in-1 day planner and journal based on the world’s most extensive study of how high performers increase productivity, set goals, prioritize projects, outperform their peers, and create the positive mindset and habits needed to win the day.

Through morning mindset journal prompts, daily goal boxes, evening scorecards, weekly habit assessments, monthly project planning, and proprietary whole life balance sheets, the Planner helps you think more strategically, prioritize like a pro, achieve your goals faster, and become more focused, happy, and productive.

Use A Formatted One Page-Productivity Planner

If you want to stay focused at work and don’t want to carry a journal with you everywhere you can use a “One-Page-Productivity-Planner” instead. For this you have several options.

Brendon Burchard’s One Page Productivity Planner

Brendon Burchard designed a simple tool for working through your day. His most important mantra is: “Never forget the inbox is nothing but a convenient organizing system for other people’s agendas.” In his High-Performance Academy (that I was a part of) he recommends to move through your day by starting your morning filling out the 1-Page Productivity Planner. I was pretty annoyed by the branding on this planner and the lack of critical items. If you want to use his approach you are probably better of by buying the High-Performance Journal.

The FindFocus Productivity Planner

Because I needed a simple but more holistic tool, I decided to create my own. It combines the essential elements you will find in the productivity journals mentioned on a single sheet of paper.

With this planner, you create your “success list.” The planner makes you focus on a small number of tasks—the vital few—essential to achieving your long-term goals. These tasks are the most important things that you can do right now to boost your focus and results exponentially.

The planner was designed to have much space to write, to plan your day, to reflect, to focus on long term and short term goals and to design your ideal routine. If you want to implement the most important tips that you will discover in this article, it’s probably the cheapest and best analog tool you can use. 

Outsource Your Focus And Get A Coach

Of all the solutions presented in this article, this is probably the highest leverage thing you can do to boost your focus at work and in life. The constant battle for focus & productivity is a task that you rarely win alone.

Staying ultra-focused on high-leverage action is the ultimate struggle for everyone working online.

Getting a coach is the ultimate life hack to stay focused and overcome overwhelm, isolation and procrastination. There is nothing like a fellow human who’s only interest is to help you.

You cannot compare this to any software or any other productivity tool. While most other solutions that require you to change your behavior create short-term excitement that fades after a week or two, your coach will be able to see patterns over time.

Having a coach looking over your shoulder can quickly become the cornerstone of your focus.

For this solution, all you have to do is show up and be radically honest with yourself and your coach.

Having some other human help you to organize your thinking and clear your head is not the cheapest option but highly recommended if you want to stay focused at work.

One solution that I’ve tried in the past was using CommitAction. This service combines getting a coach and a to-do list app. Commit Action is also one of the most affordable to get a coach because other coaches easily cost $100/hour and more. The most important thing to consider when choosing a coach is to trust your gut.

Just like every other answer to the question “How to stay focused at work” in this excessive list you probably have to try different forms of coaching and various coaches until you find someone you trust and resonate with.

Create a Dashboard and Decide Upon Your KPI’s

Whether you get a coach or not the next best thing to boost your focus is to create a dashboard. Often it’s difficult to see your progress over time. That’s why almost every company uses some controlling system or has a complete controlling department. The most sophisticated personal dashboard I have ever seen was created by Sam Ovens, a master of focus.

Sam has a simple equitation:

Results = Energy x Focus Energy = Sleep + Meditation + Exercise + Socializing Focus = Goals + Processes + Habits + Environment

To see success with focus, there is no way of improving over time if you cannot measure it.

The tips you’ll find in this guide are all based on these focus areas.

Create A Personal Dashboard

It’s next to impossible to maintain focus on your longterm goals without a dashboard. Your dashboard does not have to be complex (but it can be). If you think “I can’t concentrate on anything” and want to focus better at work, I would recommend choosing between the following options to make yourself focused. 

Get a Whiteboard

I’ve justed a lot of things when I tried to stay focused but always preferred things that are simple and highly visual like a whiteboard. This is a great way to keep track of your deep work hours and any important KPI you want to track manually.

Use a Simple Sheet of Paper and Hang It on Your Wall

If you don’t have a whiteboard to write down your goals just use a simple sheet of paper and put it to your wall. Write down your new “focus” goal in big letters and put it up in front of your desk. That way, every time you see it, you will feel motivated to focus. Everything is better than not writing down and having no visual reminders.

Use a Simple Excel Spreadsheet or Google Sheet

Excel and Google Sheets are great ways to keep track of your goals because they are so flexible.

For example, you can use this to create a financial dashboard. Being delusional about your financial situation can be one of the things that prevent you from maintaining focus on your daily tasks. There is magic in transforming data points into lines that either move up or down.

At the bare minimum, I would recommend tracking your expenses and revenue/income along with your savings. This is re