Your ready to do the work.
You know your Primary Business Focus for the year. It’s written, meaningful, and provides clarity like morning sunlight.
You invested time, thought, and energy to write S.M.A.R.T. goals.
You see what has to change to achieve your goals. What you (your team) must stop, continue, or start doing to win.
You have imagined a priority-based day. What matters is scheduled on your calendar. Your purpose to add value to your team, your organization, the world you serve guides your day.
Your set-up to enjoy a very productive day.
Resistance to the work
Quietly, something “urgent” appears.
Your commitment to do first things first is interrupted.
You’ve lost the focus needed to make progress. Your attention is drawn away to something.
What seemed so clear when you planned your day was lost in the fog of war. Chaos. Noise. Distractions.
Another morning, another day is gone forever. It’s February.
Dis-traction
A major scheme in the war on productivity is all the distraction.
Like a bird following bread crumbs into a live trap, your attention and focus are taken captive by interruptions, the noise, the gadgets, the notifications, the endless links provided by your Director of Research, Google.
Bloomberg reports on Udemy’s 2018 Workplace Distraction Report. The bottom line: “Noisy, interruption-prone offices make employees unmotivated, stressed, and frustrated.”
Udemy’s survey of more than 1,000 full-time USA workers found that
“…69 percent report being distracted at work by e-mail, chat, social media, their phones, and all the other shiny baubles that beg our attention throughout the workday. Half say that these workplace distractions result in worse performance and lower productivity.”
Before worrying about the competition, we may need to pay attention to the enemy within and create space to work.
In my new book Leaders Create Space I identify The Three Creations of Next Level Leaders. To gain traction and get results for you and your team you must:
- Create Space to THINK – the disciplined use of time, place, and resources to reflect on truth in the Story. Expect insanity, more of the same, if you fail to think.
- Create Clarity to ACT – the intentional alignment of purpose and structure to achieve victory. Expect underperformance and frustration, if you fail to set exceptions.
- Create Opportunity to GET BETTER – cultivate the environment and culture that inspires people to do inspired work. Expect the status quo and backsliding to old beliefs and behaviors if you fail to be the champion of continuous growth.
Focus matters. To maintain traction, start dealing with the distractions in your busy, noisy, cluttered world.
Create Space to reflect
What distracts you? What re-directs your attention away from the priority-based work?
What’s your “favorite” distraction? Social media? Device notifications?
What diverts your attention from doing inspired work?
A few suggestions to help you deal with dis-tractions:
- When stuck, get moving with the 3-second countdown, say it out loud and see what happens: “3. 2. 1. Start!”
- Schedule time for your priority-based work. The appointment got you to your dentist, right?
- Turn-off social media and notifications
- Schedule times to check your e-mail unless checking email is your work. What if you check it once an hour?
- Leave your mobile device at the door during human connection moments. Would you bring a newspaper to a team meeting? A novel to lunch with someone?
- Maximize your energy level, during the day and the week, schedule your work and tasks accordingly.
- Create space to think; to gain clarity; to get better by paying attention to the Story
How do you deal with re-focusing your attention?
Here’s to your Next Level,
Steve
Transform disruption into clarity for life and work!
Order my new book Leaders Create Space today.
Click on the image below to check it out on Amazon!
