003 - How to Visualize and Stay Focus to article writing.


The mind is everything. What you think you become.

This article stresses on how to visualize and stay focus on article writing or any other project.

Visualizing and staying focus is very fundamental and essential when we want to complete a website in a specified timeframe or write series of articles.

The way we visualize problems, stay focus, brainstorm ideas, analyze and come out with inventive solutions are the key strategies to reach successful blogging and successful projects.

I introduced the authority spider technique in the preface of these series of articles. And I will like to go further with these strategies.

Before we start using the spider technique, I will also like us to prepare our minds. We need to prepare our minds to focus and concentrate.

This is the first act. All great writers have a deep sense of imagination. And imagination comes from focus and visualization.



This gives us the best solutions to powerful information and writes more to feed our readers.

We first learn to focus and then graduate to visualization while we write. When we are able to reach the level of unconscious visualization while we write, everything flows like water to our mind.

Ideas pop up and we hardly get distracted. We will picture every idea like a movie as we write. Ideas will flow to our mind and through our fingers to our book or word editor like water pouring from a Fountain. This chapter prepares the mind to be opened to receive such infinite ideas undiscovered.

This is why the mind should be prepared. Consciously, your mind should be the center and master controller of your visualization. When you plan and think this consciously, reminding yourself every time you start to focus will eventually repeat the process subconsciously.

However, a mind without focus cannot visualize.

When our focus is cut off by an external distraction or interest distraction, the concentration level is switched off like a television channel tuned to another station. We can picture a focused mind like still water in a basin.

When the attention is distracted, the water is disturbed. It will take a while for a disturbed still water to assemble again to stillness. A focused mind is just like that.

If you can’t focus on one task for a long time, don’t worry. That’s normal. After reading this chapter and practicing every advice, you will be good to go.
So I am going to stress about the art of focus. There are techniques to train the mind to focus on until the task is done.

When I started doing this website thing, it was very difficult to stay focus on a particular niche or market or idea. I was very greedy with ideas that I wanted to do everything at the same.

I was the Jack of all trades and master of none. If I had met a Good Samaritan at that time to convince me to stay focus on a single idea, website or niche until serious profit started coming, I would have been a great millionaire.

This is why this chapter is very important to the Authority spider concept. In fact, if you have read this article to this paragraph, please bear in mind that the following sentence should be your first commandment towards making thousands of dollars online and making a fortune for yourself.

You should focus on one website until that website is making a great amount of money for you. 


Then you continue and continue until you can hire other workers.

This is the key. However, this key is only effective, if you choose a great and profitable market and a less competitive market as a beginner.

We shall discuss how to select the best market for your website. But for now, FOCUS is the key. So can we now focus on the word FOCUS?

According to the Webster dictionary, "Focus is the center of interest or activity." This means before we even try to focus on something, we must be interested. Else we might lose interest and lose focus.

Focusing is where everything around us become blur while we squeeze through our mind to get to the focal point of our target object in action and in mind. Some people call this “in the zone” or hooked.

This is the point where our attention is fixed and concentrated on what we are doing to the point of us becoming one with that object of imagination.

And the only enemy to this is from disturbances from external sources like another attraction to our interest or a distractive mechanism which might wake us up from our concentration and imagination. It is natural to lose little focus from natural distractions. 

However, the experienced focused mind jumps right back to the level they left immediately and continue to work. Most people find it very difficult to achieve this aim. This is because of the link between these external distractions and their personal interest or interest distractions.

You should also bear in mind that, Focus can be grouped into short term and long term. Short term is focusing on something or a work at a particular time and finishing it before doing anything else.

The long-term group of focus is concentrating on a work or project for years and completing it.

A mind that is not focused cannot finish anything at a time. The word FOCUS is a serious voluntary choice. It originates from free will, discipline and choice. It is a state of mind that builds strong walls around it to prevent any distraction.

To achieve a deep sense of responsibility and awareness towards focus requires creating of self-acceptance and belief. It is only when you turn your focus to believe that you become one with your object of focus.

When I started researching deeply into how a mind can be focused. I discovered something awesome that I want to share here.

According to John Kehoe, who happens to be one of my great virtual mentors, in his book; The Mind Power Game, (paraphrasing) the human mind is virtually huge, big, titanic and holographic to the whole universe.

In order sense, the networks, structures, and neurons in the brain and other undiscovered unseen parts of the mind are infinite like the whole universe.

This means the mind can take anything or everything and still looked unchanged to its size. If I could remember, right on from my infancy, I have learned and read and continue to learn and I have still not sensed the size of my mind or brain becoming full.

WE ARE POWERFUL BEYOND MEASURE.

We are great human beings with a spiritual mind that can learn anything and still feel our mind weigh as light as a feather. Can you feel your mind becoming heavy in your head now? I don’t think so.

But because our mind has no sense of weight, this weight loss has shifted to our responsibilities and choice on our time. We are only limited to the time we spent on earth but not on the amount or quantity of information we save to our brain.

How can we be so much powerful with our brain and so less powerful with our time? This is why our time is much more precious than anything in the world.

We cannot waste our time here by trying to do multiple of the task at the same time and waste life not finishing all at a time.

The smart approach is to find within us, what we ultimately love, cherish and feel great to implement and start working on it until it is done successfully.

When we understand this concept, we will be much more motivated to start focusing our mind to any web project we choose and complete it.

Let us begin to understand what actually happens in the brain when our mind is focused on something. The following image shows what goes on in a focused mind.


Other images and everything around us blurs out when we set the focus of our eye on something.  


Our persistence in staying focus contributes to achieving product quality and authoritative website creation. I stress more about staying focus because I found myself struggling to stay focus at early stages of my website career.

I took it upon myself to learn the very art of concentration. This helped me a lot by focusing on the single project at a time and finishing them at the right time with the setting of goals, tasks and time management. I talk more about goals and time management in chapter 4.

Reading more and practicing on this subject, we will gain experience in the art of concentration and focus. Work productivity will be improved. The time spent to complete particular project will be decreased and the problem of inconsistency will be eradicated.   

Staying focus requires the mind to picture advice of “don’ts” and “do’s”. These are the general advice on focus which targets website creation.  

General advice to stay focus on website creation.

Most people with the intensity of staying focus are dreamers. They plan their life, set up passionate goals and decides in their mind with conviction to achieve them at all cost as long as they are alive.

This approach is very crucial. This is why deciding what you dream about is very important. When you plan to select a website market that you are very passionate about, you start to visualize and dream about every aspect of your market.

There is a difference between dreaming and visualizing. Dreaming has an unconscious act. Visualizing is conscious. In the art of visualizing, when you are writing articles for your website, you are aware of what your mind is viewing.

The more time we spend on visualizing something will make us dream about it. This is because of the repetitive nature of our brain. As our subconscious mind only saves and records things based on repetition.
 
John Kehoe talks more about mind power which I recommend for everyone who really wants to stay focus in his Mind Power Training Program.

Generally, the process is a recollection of ideas from past events gathered into your mind to create a breakthrough or to solve a problem.

You come out with a good story to convince your readers of the subject in question. You accomplish this by planning, researching, analyzing and implementing.

All this is done with the guide of focus and concentration. This act of writing requires a determined and prepared mind with a single goal: to finish the website at all cost without the following two enemies of progression.

1.     External Distractions
2.     Personal Distractions or Interest Distractions

Understanding how these distractions influence the productive outcome and the ability to control them is the key step to combat inconsistencies in unfinished projects.

Examples of external distractions are the loud noises, notifications, blinking lights or sounds from phones, doorbells, television ads or any other sound or light interactions to our point of focus.

Most of these external distractions are involuntary and there may not be any way we can control them. As human beings, we are wired to immediately respond to natural distractions.

Other forms of external distractions are the persuasive and trickier versions of distractions from our main goals.

An example is you may decide to create a website about caring for babies and selling baby products until you see another niche about parenting which has more attracted products.

You may be distracted from your goal and start buying another domain name and hosting. And before you may know, you have purchased about 10 domains within a year in which you have not completed a single website. This is the most destructive distraction most people are infected with.

The root of breaking focus is evolutionary in our system. The involuntary response to sudden distractions are part of our safety routine. We cannot control this because they are hard-wired into our brain as a passive process.

The only way to combat this is to draw rules with repetition and discipline measurements like abstinence and self-denial.

Our focus is drawn to things that might be dangerous or rewarding. However, we should try to control the ones that are not beyond our reach.

Examples of personal distractions or Interest Distractions are the anticipation and rewards we seek which normally accompany the external distractions we can control.

Normally, personal distractions are the results of external distractions seeking our attention.

Examples of personal distractions may be linked or connected to what we seek or what we may be expecting from the news, entertainment, email checking, social networking notifications, phone notifications from social apps like facebook, twitter, and chatting applications or movies especially series.

When a mind is concentrated on a project and is suddenly distracted by one of this social network notifications, the mind’s attention system is disturbed.

Just like the disturbed still water. It will take you about 25 minutes to recover to that higher level of concentration again. This is why control measures to personal distractions are very important to help stay focus on a project.

There are simple measures to note when to stay focus. In other to share more light on the social media issue and for anyone to see why and how social media is affecting production and work efficiency, the following illustrations explains.  


Social media Addiction Infographic (source http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/social-media-addiction-stats/504131)





Even though social media is here to stay and very much improves our social connections and has made the world a global world.

It has also taken much of our working life’s time. Taking good measures to this great internet and social revolution personally is a good step to work completions and to stay focus.

This technique can be transferred to our writing task and online blogging schedules. As an eBook writer or an online blogger.

The most crucial advantage and the moment are to be able to concentrate and focus on a particular article, chapter or online operation and complete it before jumping on to other tasks.

However, this hasn’t been easy for most writers and bloggers at the current social networking stage of the world. The facebook, twitters, and emails have taken much of our concentrated time currently. 

If I should add text messaging, WhatsApp messenger and other phone applications which we all use daily in our lives to connect with our loved ones.

These have now become a hobby for most people and are the most destructible components in making us lose focus and prolong the time spent on reaching our primary targets and daily goals. Therefore the following are guidelines and tips to control personal and external distractions.



Guidelines to control Personal and External Distractions.

1.     Identify what breaks your concentration and avoid switching them on as you work. With regards to social networks, this can be achieved by setting up a time and goal to work on a project. Break this project into small tasks, advisably 30minutes intervals.

2.     Reward yourself after each task with 3 minutes resting, stretching of the legs or walking around and if you can control yourself checking your mail in 3hrs intervals. In other words, break every 30minutes by stretching or walking around for ergonomic purposes and only check your mail or other personal distractions every 3hours. (However, some people have carried away and tempted to not continue after the 3hrs break intervals.) If you find yourself not able to control yourself because of some personal interest in one of your twitter feeds or Facebook notifications, the only way is just to abstain from them by switching your internet data off until you are done with your project.

3.     Close every tab in your browser if the project you are working on requires the internet.

4.     Switch off the internet data of phones, peripherals, and gadgets to give you peace of mind to work.

5.     Work in close doors where there are fewer noise distractions around.

6.     Wear earphones or headset if you have people around you. If suitable for you, use meditative and concentrated musical melodies with no voice over. Most people are able to concentrate well with low melodies of classical music, jazz or any low suitable and favorite instrument. (The trick is to guide your mind to a stimulation of prolonged concentration and focus.)

7.     Plan and write down daily tasks by breaking your daily writing goals into parts and set this tasks with time intervals of completion. (I share more light on Task, Goals and Time in chapter 3.) This helps to concentrate with each task within minutes of intervals. Moving from task to task during the day will help motivate you to stay focus and eventually help to reach a daily writing goal.



Apart from using the above guidelines, you are responsible for controlling your attention to the current project you are working on.

This is also very difficult since most people don’t plan or set up goals and end up working on multiple projects within a day which they never finish within years. Chapter 4 share more light on setting up Project Goals, tasks, scheduling, and controls.

There are tools that also help us to stay focus. These tools or practices are fundamental to the beginning learner who wants to stay focus on a work without distractions.


1.     Low Melody Instrumentals

Low melody instrumentals do well for some people, while others prefer jazz or low slow violin or classical music.

In my shared musical melody, I prefer Paul Collier from stokes. Paul’s meditational music has helped me a lot to concentrate. There are other low melodies to start with. The aim is to use the low melody to stimulate the mind to concentrate and to stay focus.

Low melody music cuts down on distractions and helps to stay focus on works. The goal here is to prepare the mind to stay focus until a prescribed work is done.
There are many types of music that have been shown to put the mind in study mode. The following are some of the list mentioned:
·        Baroque classical music is said to have mind-boosting effects. Productivity writer David Allen of “Getting Things Done” fame has said he prefers music like Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #3, and other Baroque tunes.
·        Others say that music at 60 beats-per-minute is required to put the brain in a “bright and breezy” frame of mind. In this state, your thinking and creativity are said to be easier. Concertos for Recorder – Telemann & Vivaldi is recommended.
·        Since classical music may not be your thing there are other types of music that have been shown to increase your concentration levels. Ambient music or sound is designed to keep your brain engaged at a lower, subconscious level. Waterfalls, rain, seashore, whatever your taste.
·        More modern electronic “Chill out” music genres such as Trip-hop, Nu jazz, Ambient House, Ambient Trance, New Age and other sub-genres of Downtempo are designed to relax the mind and allow it to roam.
·        Eno’s “Music for Airports” has been noted as being useful for serious studying and deep concentration. This music was designed to relax stressed-out travelers at the airport and put them at ease.

When you start focusing and gradually reach a higher level with the best and suited environment, you become one with what you are doing. This is what the psychologist Dr. Perry has to say from lifehacker.com

From what I've studied, it seems that both the right and left brain are working efficiently together, but able to screen out peripheral distractions. Time seems to disappear and you and the thing you're doing feel as though they've become one. Such flow states have aspects in common with trance states, though it's tough to do MRIs of someone writing a book or playing a game.

When your mind is set on a task with all the above guides. There is no way you will be distracted by mere personal distractions or inconsistencies. 



Goals, Task and Time Management in webbuilding