be more focused

Easing into a new schedule with my wife home and looking after the little one. No more daycare dropoffs and pickups so I now have another 2 to 2.5 hours in my day to get things done. So far so good. I have been trying to stay committed to using 3 hour time blocks to get things done. 1 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon and i don’t interrupt my work with phone calls or email checks. Just the work at hand. so far I like it and it feels Like I am getting a lot more done.

Every day I use a two page daytimer system to track my day and work towards my goals. On one page I set out three columns, P, O and A. They stand for the Purpose, Outcome and Action of each thing that I am working towards. Quite often one of my regular daily outcomes is to “do billable work” In my business I get paid a contingency fee when I am successful on behalf of my clients yet about half the time I do the same kind of work for other people at an hourly rate similar to an accountant or lawyer. I began to realize that quite often it is difficult for me to actually get down to the business of booking billable hours consistently as there are always the little interruptions in the day. In most cases I am really happy if I can book 5 hours of time in a day but it could really be so much more. With my wife staying home in the new year I won’t be driving little one to daycare in the morning at 7:30 and picking her up at 4. This alone accounts for two hours in my day and the extra work that I can get done in this time period should more than pay for itself if only half of those hours saved can be turned into directly billable time.

I’ve talked with other professionals about billable time like lawyers and accountants and have heard that you’re doing pretty well to book 5 to 5.5 hours a day.

Not sure about this focus thing. I have a major client at the moment that requires my full attention. Full stop.

To do that means giving up time on smaller things that may have to slide until this work is done. I’ve tried multi tasking and it just plain burns me out to the point I can’t write, think or ask the questions no one else asks that make me valuable as a consultant.

This morning in the pool I began to examine the concept of focused thinking. In retrospect I don’t think I had previously realized how much my brain jumps around when it wrestles with the events of the day. Swimming in the pool today I decided to pick a specific area of life that I wanted to see improvements on and just focus my attention on it with a mental review of my current efforts to formulate a plan for the future.

I learned that my mind really does like to jump from one thing to another. It took time and effort to keep my mental “sight” on target but after a few laps in the pool I was able to carefully assess aspects of my new approach to weight discipline.

With some persistence and many false starts I was able to build a series of concepts and analyze my progress. This is a skill I would llike to develop so I can bring more resources to bear on something.

This is a technique I will have to practice. It appears to work well with the rhythms of swimming or running. I’ll try it when I exercise in the morning.

It might be useful to use a notepad or a blank sheet of paper as a focal point to capture, collate and organize my thoughts and plans. I need to keep applying myself and working on using focus as a tool to improve performance and the results I achieve on something I want to obtain.

One element of this that could be much stronger is the process of visioning the outcome.