I often myself in situations when I don’t know what I’m doing really. I might have tried to accomplish the same task for 3hrs, and it should take 20min. It is not that I’m not trying, but my focus is just not there.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the smaller the task, the easier it is to focus for me. I think it is because if an assignment is more modest, there are also fewer unintended sidetracks to follow. Sidetracks that most often won’t do anything than cost time.
So, if you find yourself in a situation where it is hard to focus, maybe you should break down your current task to a bunch of smaller ones. For example, instead of having a “Post a blog post”-task on your ToDo-list, break it down to “Write down a blog post in Word”, “Find a featured image for the blog post”, “Upload the text and the image to your blog”, “Post it and share it on Twitter”.