I’ve been stuggling with this and slowly improving in the last year.
I tend to spin up too many projects (10 half started issues of our newsletter, 10 nee features for our product, etc.)
I call this Shiny Object syndrome.
Heres a great article I read that nails is nicely.
This is definitely something we can struggle we as entrepreneurs we tend to have the “sickness” - which is whenever I see something I can’t help but think about how I could improve it or make it better. Constantly seeing business opportunities and some of them are just too juicy to pass by.
Something that I’ve found effective to table my appetite is to limit the effort to test the product. So what I mean by this - me and my CTO on my main gig (theoremreach.com) spun off a side company that’s vague enough that it can encompass all of our business ideas (Voltax Holdings, LLC). Then we set a rule that about once a month we will take a day and in 6 hours we must build and launch a product to the point that we are getting paid for it or we aren’t. And if it works, great we can put some more time in it, but if we aren’t making cash, we scrap it.
It’s rather limited in what you can do, but it makes you think really critically about it.
Our first venture was vinhub.io, which essentially is a middleman company between companies like cars.com and dealers interested in buying leads for folks looking for cars. We launched vinhub in 6 hours (well technically a little more adding in the time at the bank to setup Voltax, but the dev was done in 6 hours). Within the first hour of launch we were seeing over $600/hr (this was really, really exciting). It has since pseudo crashed and burned (we could maybe fix it, but it would likely require all of the revenue we’ve made thus far). But it was an exciting taste for what you can do when you think critically. And best of all, it’s not something we spent weeks or months building. We built it in 6 hours. Of course, after our initial success, we spent a fair bit more time refining and optimizing the system, but we got what we wanted - a true lean startup style test.
I’d definitely encourage folks to consider this mantra for their side projects. It allows us to focus on TheoremReach most of the time, but still give us an outlet for those “really good” ideas we often come up with.
I think this is nice in theory, but I can think of several good ideas that would fail the 6-hour-to-launch rule. My current business, which started as a side project, generates healthy revenue, but it took 2-3 months to be in a rough MVP state and get a couple of paying customers.
I love the idea of a forum post asking people if they have trouble focusing which tells them to go and read an article 
Maybe skip the article and get back to work on whatever your top priority is right now?
Not meant to be snarky, genuinely made me LoL.
There is a nice audio-book that I listened on when running - “The Productivity Project”. Many interesting things in there about the nature of productivity and procrastination, but one thing caught my attention: training your mind to focus via the “breathing meditation”.
Traditional meditation lets your mind to wander, and it is the opposite to what we’re trying to achieve.
Breathing meditation is focusing on one thing – your own breathing – for 5, 10, 15 minutes (how much you can), and each time your mind wanders off to something else, gently suppress those thoughts and return the focus to the breathing.
Just like with gym exercise, you train your mind to stay on a topic ignoring the distractions.
Sounds promising, and I’m trying to do that now when I run (without the audiobook or a podcast), or simply for 5 minutes before the sleep.
It seems I’m getting more aware when my mind starts to get distracted, which is a win in itself.
The traditional meditation concept across the biggest schools is all about keeping focus and awareness (samadhi), including awareness of breath. Wandering mind is kind of opposite to meditation.
Anyway I meditate daily, keep all the distracting sites on a separate laptop, don’t watch movies or TV, don’t play games and still struggle to get 160-170hrs of work a month without external pressure (like having a client and deadlines).
Everyone struggles with focus. Some things I’ve tried which help:
Getting enough sleep (and to a lesser extent, exercise)
Keeping a constantly updated ordered list of priorities in view
Breaking down work into small, concrete tasks
LOL! Ohhh… the irony!
Although for me, it’s not so much being distracted by a blog /article but me choosing to add additional tasks and spreading myself too thin.
So, ironically, this particular article has actually helped me realize that I’m WORKING on too many things at once. And I’d actually be better off working on fewer things and spending the spare time reading.
It’s kinda managing scope creep in a project. It’s much better to not even start a new feature than to get it half done and then realize you’re spread too thin. So, working half as much, but getting that half completely done is much better.