Speaker 1: Every single day, the attention span of the human race is decreasing and a recently published study shows that it is all because of the amount of content that we are being presented with. I'm sure you have seen the effects because it is much harder to now read a novel rather than just scroll away with YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels. Anytime we sit down to do something meaningful, be it study for exams or practice a new song on the guitar, we are bombarded with a lot of notifications which distract us and kill our precious time. Around this time last year, I was stuck with this cycle of waking up, being motivated to do something, wasting my entire day and feeling regretful in the end. I broke out of that cycle and did something meaningful in life which I am currently proud of. And in this video, I will be sharing you how exactly I did it and what are the steps you can take right now to quickly get rid of the distractions and be more focused on what you want to achieve in life. If you are new here, hi, my name is Anuj Pachel, I am a final year MBBS student at Government Medical College Nagpur and if you like to see videos like this, please consider subscribing. Without any further ado, let's go. 1. Don't rely on motivation to be your sole factor driving you from one point to another Always, always plan out a discipline and stick to that discipline because motivation is always temporary. But if you build a habit, you don't have to think about it before doing it. After waking up in the morning, brushing our teeth is a natural habit. It is a discipline which we have formed through all the years of practice. Now we don't have to be motivated to brush our teeth, it just is, we just have to do it. Even if we have so many other things to do, we always stop and brush our teeth. I mean most of us do. So let's say that you want to study every single day. But whenever you sit and study, something comes up and you have to go away. But if you make studying an indispensable part of your life, your mind will rearrange things and make time for that particular thing to happen. So the actionable step here would be to write down all the things which you want to be an indispensable part of your life and then try to work out in which part of your day will that thing particularly fit. After you have done it for 10-20 days, you will form a habit and gradually and gradually every single time you have to do it, it will be less friction and more work done. Because you just don't have to think about it anymore. It won't feel mature, it will just feel like a habit. You might be feeling that you are wasting a lot of time on Instagram or YouTube. So do one thing. Measure where you are spending your time. Open up your screen time reports, screen time analytics and see where your time actually is going. Once you find out that these are the things which are killing your time, you can go ahead and remove that. Personally for me, I spend a lot of time on YouTube because I like watching YouTube videos, I like making them. And secondly, I spend a little bit more time on Instagram than I should be spending. So there are two ways in which you can control your application or mobile phone use. The first one is that, add more friction to be able to use the app. So what people do is, people uninstall Instagram, uninstall YouTube right before the exams come up. So it increases the friction for you to access those apps. For example, you will have to go to the app store and download it and then log in to actually see what you always were seeing. Another way to beat the system is to move your app to the last page on your wallpaper screen so that the next time you have to access it, you have to scroll a lot. That increases the friction and the more friction you have, the less time you are going to spend on your phone. You can also install the different types of app blockers which are present on the app store or the play store. They could help. But to be honest, the most important point is that, have the willpower to just say to yourself that no, I don't want to watch YouTube anymore, I want to study. Once you get that, all of these things are just unnecessary and your mind has a much bigger app blocker installed rather than just some random app you found on the app store. Right, the third point is, find a time for you to be completely distracted. I mean, in that one or two hours, just totally go wild and, you know, spend time doing whatever you like. Don't even think about work in that point. Once you have that dedicated one or two hours in your life, what will happen is that the remaining all hours, you'll work so that in the anticipation that I have to waste 2 hours in the end, I'll work now. I use this technique a lot because I study throughout the day and the afternoon and the entire evening. It's like when it's 5 o'clock, after that my brain stops working and I go into this hibernation mode where I don't study and don't work and don't film, all of that. So I have this dedicated part of a day in which I'm not working. In fact, I also have a dedicated day available that is Sunday. So I don't film at all in Sunday. I don't, you know, study much in Sunday. I just take a break from everything that I'm doing so that from Monday, I could just start with that zeal, with that charisma once again. But please take this with a grain of salt because you should be able to in the end limit your distraction hours. After you're done with that distraction, you don't gradually diffuse that into your productive hours. Right. The next point is set a zone of focus. What do I mean by that? Whenever I'm studying, I set my brain to into complete Zen focus mode. What it means that in that point, I've set up psychological barricades so nothing can get to me. And only thing that I'm visualizing through my tunnel glaucomatous vision is my studies and only to complete one particular chapter or complete one particular book. Clear your mind and be focused and have a clear objective of what you want to do. And in that productivity zone, which I call the focus hours, do focus work, which will be 10 times more effective than just doing normal work. It will be like chopping the wood with a very sharp axe rather than with an unsharp one. And the way to sharpen this is to be tunnel vision completely. Whatever happens now, I have to sit for 4 hours and read a book and I don't have to pay attention to anything at this time, whatever happens, it's just me, my book and my eyes. That's it. That should be your tunnel vision. So that is what I call focus hours of work, which will be more productive. Next up is very, very important. That is set up a time zone for different activities. I'm currently dealing with two most important things in my life. First is finally MBBS and second is YouTube channel. So I have set a complete time zone in which in this particular time period, I will only focus on YouTube versus I'll only focus on final year. So that usually goes something like this. In the morning after I wake up, I spend the first two or three hours of my life generating new content ideas, filming, shooting, scripting, editing, all of that because I work more efficiently that way. And in the afternoon from 2 to 5, I focus only, only on my studies. So I watch lectures. I do question banks. I solve tests, all of that good stuff. And in the evening, I take a complete break, which is my most unproductive hour. Now, mind you, this is my timetable when I'm not exam going. When I'm exam going, it's like 20 hours of studies every single day. The next point is that if you're getting too distracted and if you can't focus in one place, it probably is a good indicator that you should probably change up your environment for a few days or a few weeks until you get back to the productive zone that was your bedroom additionally. Changing your environment will give you a fresh perspective. It will keep you more motivated. I'm pretty sure you've experienced it. Whenever we go and study in a different place, we are more productive than usual. If you're going to the library, what you can do is sit in a different chair, sit in a different desk versus if you are at home, you could sit in your dining table or you can sit in your room or you can sit in the rooftop or you can sit on the top of the world. It doesn't matter. I'm actually trying to achieve this myself because currently in this room, I manage my studies. I manage my channel and it's sometimes gets a bit blurred because my mind does not focus on studying and my mind does not focus on the channel. It just doesn't focus at all. So what I'm trying to achieve in the next two or three months is hopefully make a proper studio for YouTube thing and let this be room kept for, you know, only studying and enjoying life that is. If you don't have a bigger house, what you can do is simply just move your desk around to another angle and that helps a lot. I did that back in December when I was bored with, you know, sitting in the same place for like two or three years. The next thing is finding meaning in your work. The other day I was watching a video and in that video, a person said I was going to my classes, but every single day I was in the classes after 20 minutes, I zoned out and I did not understand even one word the professor was saying. So I questioned myself, what should I do? And is it really the course for me or is it really the class should I be taking? So the reason he was distracted was not because he was thinking of something else, but rather because the subject which he was taking was not meaningful to him. It's the same reason I did not like Sanskrit in class 7th and 8th and I used to be completely distracted in the class. And it's probably the same reason why you guys in first year MBBS don't like anatomy because you just don't feel the vibe of it. So unless and until you don't find something meaningful in your work, something meaningful in your studies, you will constantly be distracted because you won't find those things interesting to you. I'll give you an extreme example of finding a meaning in your work thing. So my final exams of third year MBBS ended on a Friday and I had to upload a video on Sunday. So guess what I did after coming back home when all my friends were going out to parties, enjoying, chilling out. I sat down at 6 p.m. My paper ended at 5 p.m. by the way, and sat the entire night and just edited everything and made a beautiful video that currently has likes of views. So the basic idea is this. If you find meaning in your work, nothing will stop you. You won't even get a single thought other than what your work currently is. Next point is if you're continuously distracted and if you've tried out every single thing which I've talked about in the above points, you should definitely take a break because I feel like you've burnt out and your life is getting monotonous. You're doing the same routine every single day and you might feel like you've lived 365 days, but it's actually you've just lived one single day for 365 times. So make sure that you are not doing this to yourself. Make sure that you're taking enough breaks, going on trips, going on adventures, finding your escape, doing something meaningful in life apart from the same routine that you've been following. Break the monotonosity because it will break you otherwise. The next point is have a clear vision and have a clear goal of what you want to do in life. When I was in class 12th, I wanted only one thing. I wanted to be All India Rank 1. There was a poster there which says AIR 1, Maximum Effort. Yeah, that's right. So I had a clear vision. I had written it down and my only goal was to work on it. So whenever I felt distracted, I used to look at it and be like, leave all this nonsense and study. It might be as extravagant as putting a poster on your Almera or it could be just simply writing down on your notes app that I have to achieve this particular thing in a particular day. So you can do two kinds of things. First is the short-term goals and second is the long-term goals. Short-term goals is what I have to do in two years, one year, at the end of six months. Those are long-term goals. Make sure that your short-term goals add up in the end to take you towards your long-term goals and having a proper plan of the day will really, really keep you productive all throughout and you won't feel much distracted. Point number 10 is keeping a logbook of your progress. So whenever you're doing something which is very, very heavy, let us say completing the entire course of MBBS and you won't really feel much, much motivated after you've done like 30 or 40% of it. At that point, looking back at your logbook, looking back at every single day progress which you have made, really, really motivates you a lot and it, you know, rids you of all of the distractions. I'll give you an example. Before my university examination started, I did five or so question banks of Marrow every single day and that really felt good to me because it was meaningful and every single day when I was doing a question bank, I was feeling good, I'm doing justice to the past me who has worked so hard to get here. You could do daily journaling. You can use different apps which keep the record of what you're doing or you can add voice notes. Do whatever you want. If you want to keep a journal, that would really help you. The last point is the most important point of this video. It is, agar tumhe bohot distracted lag raha hai, go for a walk, get back in, just sit down and do it. Most of the things in life can be boiled down to this is first of all, keep your phone in the fridge and second of all, just sit down and study. Sit or sit down and do whatever thing which you're trying to do in the first place because you know that in the end you have to get it done and no matter what you do, nobody else is going to do it for you. So if nothing else works, just sit and just start because starting is the hardest part and once you just start, it will be very, very easy. All right. I really, really hope that this video helped you out and if it did, you can help me out by pressing that subscribe button in two seconds because making videos such as this take up a ton of time, effort and energy and subscribing in two seconds would make up for all of that. Thank you so much for watching. It's your boy Anuj. Smash that like button on your way out. I'll see you next time. Goodbye.