be more focused

This is a great book to push forward to being more focused on tasks. I’ve found that in my personal life and work, I’m being bombarded with things I need to do, and overwhelmed with getting it all done. This book offers great keys to making every moment actionable.

Every once and a while I like to blog just to get my ideas organized and expose them to other concepts and criticism. For me, staying focused means to keep on one task until it’s complete or to keep track of multiple tasks to make sure they are not having problems. I think I’ve grown over the last year in this task, just keeping track of what I need to do, and staying focused on it. Focusing on work is a whole lot different than focusing on my family. There I really need to learn how to focus on my children’s needs rather than be task oriented. Sometimes I get home and I tend to think I need to accomplish X, Y, and Z before I can do something with them—Completely wrong! When I change roles (from being a worker to being a parent) I need to change my perspective on how I treat my children. I need to listen to them, when they want to read me a report or a story they’ve written (Not criticizing the grammar or spelling). I need to encourage them, and give them my time freely with no conditions of a task completion. I’m a long way from this type of focus.

I’ve scheduled today as an Interruption day, a day to catch up on my email and to focus on helping people who tend to interrupt me and ruin my chain of thought. I love problem solving, but it takes a lot of intellectual horsepower (which my wife doesn’t really understand). Interruptions are the things which divert my attention away from the task at hand. Over the last week I was able to make huge strides with my job, and overcame a bunch of unforeseen problems because I was focused.

Another thing I found was that Exercise really helps me to focus, four times a week, I walk 2 miles on the treadmill and do some weight lifting. If I do this in the morning, I am much more attentive, and more responsive to the tasks I’m working for that day. Probably I’m getting more oxygen to my brain, thus helping solve little tasks faster. Amazing what a little clean air will do for a person…

And each day when People call about anything, I tell them that I will take time to spend with them to help them with their needs, at a scheduled time in the future, ‘not right now’. Some people get kind of huffy about this one, but for the most part I haven’t been fired yet for telling people not right now.

I think this process is working for me, but I’m going to give it a few months until I call it a success.

1. make a realistic goal list for the day, try to get excited about working on that task and completing the task before moving on to another task. Start with one task for the day.
2. Schedule in interruptions- an interruption is how we interact with each other, it should be expected. Give the person undivided attention and try to resolve the problem, if the problem is too large to be resolved at that time, explain the time constraints on your schedule and ask the person to take responsibilities for tasks before they dump the task on you (i.e. if there is something they can do, make them complete that task before you look at making time for the task on your schedule, maybe they will do the entire task themselves). And the person requesting must give you a valid expectation for this task, don’t let them off with “when you have time” or “just as soon as you can”, they need to tell you when they want it because they will be the first telling your manager that you didn’t finish something you agreed to doing.
3. I can do a lot but I can’t do everything – try to find people who can help you, break tasks into smaller tasks and share with team members. Help each other with problems, most of the time two sets of eyes are better than one.
   If I set down to do the above, I hope I’ll be able to finish the Important and get down to the mundane. Please reply back with your comments or ideas on the subject.