Time to Focus
If you find yourself bouncing from one email distraction to another, distracted daily, it’s time to bring meaning back to your career.
Kory Kogon, co-author of “The 5 Choices to Extraordinary Productivity” (Simon & Schuster, 2014), says the problem is widespread. In fact, an international six-year study by Franklin Covey found 40 percent of respondents indicated they spent 40 percent of their time on things that were “not important” to them or to their companies.
“Our attention is under attack and people feel overwhelmed like never before,” Kogon says. Technology has left individuals feeling overwhelmed with the number of decisions they must make during the day, the number of tasks that require their attention and the drain of their personal energy.
Adam Merrill, another co-author of “The 5 Choices,” says the book research made him much more cognizant of how these challenges take a toll on individuals.
“You can see the cost of this on our daily lives, on our relationships that have not been nurtured and on our goals that have not been met,” Merrill says. People waste time, attention and energy on things that don’t drive the most important results.
To ensure that decisions are not driven by the urgent, the authors break down the five choices that individuals have on a daily basis:
Choice 1: Act on the important, don’t react to the urgent
Ask yourself whether something is important. At first, it takes time to stop the reactive brain. But then it becomes second nature. The goal is to increase your ROM – return on the moment – in the midst of daily distractions.
Choice 2: Go for extraordinary, don’t settle for ordinary
Once you make time for what matters, you work on what success looks like in your current, most important roles, such as supervisor, coworker, father or daughter. By thinking about what you want success to look like in each role, you’re in a better position to reach extraordinary success.
Choice 3: Schedule the Big Rocks, don’t sort gravel.
Instead of filling your time with useless tasks, equivalent to filling a jar with gravel, you first schedule the most important activities and let the rest fall in between the bigger pieces. You regain control of your work and life through careful planning.
Choice 4: Rule your technology, don’t let it rule you.
Technology must become your servant and not your master. You must master how to interact with your technology so that it’s important and useful to your life. That includes learning how to see order in the chaos, and sort incoming information into four buckets: appointments, tasks, contacts and notes/documents. Email is also managed with order, blocking out time to check your email throughout the day, every couple of hours instead of every couple of minutes. By limiting email interruptions, you preserve the flow of your work and eliminate wasted time trying to refocus.
Choice 5: Fuel your fire, don’t burn out.
A high-pressure work environment leaves employees drained. By choosing to recharge your mental and physical energy, you’re feeding your “thinking brain.” You renew your brain with physical activity, adequate sleep, healthy food options, relaxation and healthy relationships.
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