The behavior I wanted to observe was seeing how frequently I lose focus when doing a task. And from my experience, most of my distractions by myself happen with social media or the lack of energy due to mornings. Otherwise, when I’m with friends, they become distractions when I’m trying to complete a task–talking about anything that comes up. Something I did for this 2 day’s observation was that I didn’t record my distractions on a very rigid time system. So a thing I want to try out next time is to record every hour and see how many times I got distracted and that would provide more numerical data for analysis. I feel like that would make my results a lot more consistent since this run-through I didn’t follow a timeline and felt like I missed out on some distractions to track.
The two models I decided to use are the connection circle and the fishbone diagram (featured image) and I decided to sketch both of them on the page (including the time stamps of the distractions and what distracted me). I’ve noticed with the connection circle that some things could be the cause of losing focus but also could be used to retain focus–so some things were partially beneficial and detrimental. With the fishbone diagram, I was able to list a lot more things that could lead to a distracted state since I feel like the categories provided a nice starting point for brainstorming. It also made me think about things that are a must when I’m concentrating on a task. All in all, this observation allowed me to see how I focus on work and what things are necessary when I’m in the zone.
