Distractions, Distractions, Distractions!
Every day serves up a gazillion choices. If you can choose your highest priorities, focus on the actions that will provide the biggest payoff and ignore the time-sucks, you will be ahead of 98% of the population!
In Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and in business, he references a survey by Duke University that found over 40% of what we do everyday is not conscious decisions but habit. Most of us have habits that distract and waste precious time. The great news is when we become aware of these, we can make better choices. I mentioned last newsletter about using a time log to get a good sense of where you are actually spending your time. If you have done this, scan for the time wasters and distractions. Now that you know those things are displacing productive time, make a decision to do something differently next time you start to slide into an unproductive activity.
Sometimes, we distract ourselves to procrastinate. Instead of making calls, we might scan and answer emails or read and post on Facebook! Does this sound familiar? Again, your becoming aware of how much this wastes time is important to shifting this behavior.
A good way to stay focused is, at the beginning of each day, to identify the top 3 things that will move you toward your achieving your goals. Most of the time, these are not the urgent items on your to-do list, but actions that will build and expand your business.
To put this in to practice this week:
- Identify at least 1 unproductive habit and when a trigger causes you to start the unproductive habit, replace it with a productive one
- Identify what you distract yourself with when procrastinating.
- Begin each day identifying the top 3 priorities that day and focus on getting those done first!
- Don't put off eating frogs!
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