How To Stop Majoring in Minor Things
Master to Your Distractions
Do you ever find yourself overly busy but not really getting anywhere with your life? Do you spend countless hours “doing stuff” but at the end of the day you have nothing to show for all your hard work? Are you easily pulled off course and wind up feeding into other people’s mayhem and disorder?
This is what happens when we focus on activities that don’t matter but they suck up our time. In today’s world, with all we have to focus on and literally hundreds of choices to make on what to do next, it is easier than ever to spread your time out over doing literally dozens of different things in a day. When this happens, we end up being half-masters of the many, and true masters of none.
Trying to organize the number of distractions you face everyday is an overwhelming task and can prove to be futile. In a world of instant response time and all the beeps and whistles that pop up all vying for our attention, attempting to make order out of chaos is enough to drive you insane. When you major in minor things, you end up paying too much attention to the activities that are right “there” and less energy is channeled into those few “golden nuggets” that really matter.
A Sense of Urgency
Here is an example. You are at home and you have to write a blog post for your deadline tomorrow. You have notifications on your PC and other emails are coming in. Your email notifications tab reminds you every six seconds when someone comments on your FB post, tweets you or messages drop in from people just looking to see what you are up to.
You stop writing every few minutes to check these. You get back to the writing and you lost that steady flow you had. Next the phone rings [oops, should have turned that off] and it was nothing mind blowing, just a friend who wanted to chat about his day.
While that may be important to him or her, you are trying to improve your writing skills and could have done without that. In the end, what should have been a good solid 30 minutes of writing took one hour and your mind feels it is spinning with everything “going on.”
This is the sense of “senseless urgency” most people are connected to these days. We are training ourselves in the art of “react and act” without any form or purpose.
I know what it’s like to have that urge to feel busy, that you are really accomplishing something or that you are so connected with the world that everything has to be taken care of in the moment, as it’s happening, right away so that nobody feels left out. But here is the thing…
None of it Matters.
Your emails and notifications will be there tomorrow. Your friend that called to talk about her day will just call somebody else or wait until later when you are free. When you enter a reactive state, this becomes your conditioned way of living. When you spend more time and energy channeling into the activities that don’t matter, you lose sight of the big prize. You lose FOCUS [Follow One Course Until Successful], and instead of doing what matters and making a real dent in the universe, you fall into micromanaging lots of little stuff that, at the end of the day, amounted to no more than putting out some fires and feeding into the frenzy of the world’s “take me now” syndrome.
Building the daily habit of focusing in and narrowing down on your CORE ACTIVITY is going to have long term gains. Instead of spreading yourself out and trying to manage all the stuff coming in, make it a habit of asking yourself “Is this important right now? Can it wait for an hour when my FOCUS session is over?”
In 90% of the cases, yes it can.
F.O.C.U.S.
I was always in the habit of having 2-3 projects on the go at once. I thought they had to be all done at once. The problem with this is, you spread your time thin and it increases not just the workload, but your “emergency response time” which means the number of distractions, calls, and small details you would normally be able to handle for one project has now tripled.
F.O.C.U.S. on one major obstacle, work through it, and then tackle the next one. Of course there are many people who have no choice to take on 3-4 projects at the same time; this is when you master the art of delegating or outsourcing it to a Virtual Assistant. Let others manage your tasks that you don’t have to do so you can focus on the creativity or business side of things.
Takeaway “Massive Action” Steps
Today, make it a discipline to disengage yourself for one hour from all your electronic devices. If one hour is too long, you can start with small increments of just 20-30 minutes. Try to develop the habit of powering down for one hour a day so you can spend this time meditating or doing some deep thinking.
Make a list of all the distractions you struggle with. Watching too much TV? Surfing sites just to kill time? Responding right away to all your emails and notifications? Reacting to other people’s emergencies when it has nothing to do with you? Once you have made a list, decide what it is you have control over.
The best way to manage your “reactions” is to decide if you will allow yourself to be pulled into reacting or ignoring it. If it is something you can control, decide what you can do. Turn off your phone? Unhook the internet? Move to a location that is more quiet and you will not be disturbed? Make a decision to “think first” before rushing in to take care of something.
Use the F.O.C.U.S. Method: Follow One Course Until Successful. Choose your battles carefully and dive into it until you have completed it. Avoid spreading yourself too thin by doing too much. And, do a way with multi-tasking. When you concentrate on the one task at hand it adds more value to your current project because you are dedicating 100% to it.
The post How To Stop Majoring in Minor Things appeared first on OBSTACLE CRUSHERS.
