Stay Focused By Managing Emotions

Emotions at work can run high, particularly in healthcare settings and focused attention is a precious resource whatever your role, whatever your business. Gathering and directing attention towards a specific goal makes things happen and can do so in a short amount of time.

Lack Of Focus

How often do you find yourself thinking more about not wanting to do the job in front of you rather than simply focusing on attacking the task and getting it done?

But, what are the reasons for distracting attentions? One of the main levers in disseminating focus are emotions, which draw our attention towards issues and events often unconnected to the job in hand. At this point, time merely passes and even with all the time in the world, productivity begins to suffer.

Regulating Emotions In The Workplace

Working in a care environment, being fully aware of everything that is going on is key to success, but with something this emotive how can you ensure that your focus isn’t compromised? Here are a few practical ideas to help regulate emotions in the workplace –

• Make time for you – Whether it’s ensuring that you engage in regular physical activity, maintain good sleep hygiene or simply taking time out in the garden, these are the sorts of activities that help to build attentive capacity at work. They help to direct focus, filter out distractions and manage emotions in return for what only needs to be a limited time outlay. Such activities shouldn’t be seen as indulgences, rather as an investment in well-being, contributing to longer periods of peak effectiveness when you moist need it. Added value doesn’t simply equate effectively to hours spent working, but those hours of quality, focused attention certainly will. Having allowed for time consistently to commit to yourself will not only help to focus attention but also to compartmentalise other issues that might arise when you least need them to.

• Don’t attempt to multi-task – Tasks requiring less cognitive functions might fine for this process but nothing truly meaningful can be achieved when attempted in conjunction with something else. How can you expect to maintain complete focus on an important issue when it is competing for attention with other tasks? An attempt to multi-task at the wrong time will only serve to highlight inaccuracies rather than highlight productivity.

• Avoid obvious distractions – Why does your phone beep when a text message arrives? It’s to capture your attention and create a level of urgency. If you don’t deal with the email or message immediately, how likely is it to have adversely affected your wellbeing? Probably not at all, meaning that it’s best to just switch them off until the time is right to deal with them.

• Manage time – It’s likely that as a carer or nurse everyone feels that they deserve your attention. Whilst it’s important to ensure that people aren’t neglected it’s also good practice to leave some time allotted for open space where you think creatively and focus attention on things that will have been building up in the background. This might be on a daily or weekly basis and you might want to enlist assistants, co-workers, family or friends to ensure that you stick to making use of the open space you create.

• Meetings – Ask yourself whether you really need to be in this meeting that’s been called or whether all you’re doing is effectively showing your face. If you’ve called the meeting, does it really have a purpose for everyone that’s attending and could you be adversely affecting their day? Meetings can often prove to be nothing more than organisational theatre, with the attendees serving nothing more than a theatrical function.

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