At the end of the day or the week, do you often ask yourself “what have I really accomplished?”  The reality is that you’ve probably accomplished lots of tasks.  But you probably haven’t completed the tasks that help you to achieve your most important personal and professional goals.  Why?  Most likely, it’s a lack of FOCUS.

As humans, we naturally gravitate toward pursuing activities that fall into one of two categories.  We do what’s easy and comfortable, or we pursue the “shiny object” that’s fun and exciting but, truth be told, is truly beyond our reach or doesn’t help us achieve our critical goals.

Companies fall into these same traps.  They continue to plod along, doing the things that are easy and comfortable.  Companies are also tempted by the “shiny object,” pursuing strategies that other companies have found successful or that are “hot” at the moment.  Similar to the “what have I really accomplished” question that individuals ask themselves, companies find themselves asking: “where did the money go?”  Often, in the end, it’s the lack of focus that has drained the company’s coffers.

Focusing on What’s Important

To quote Steven Covey from his famous book entitled The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, we need to “put first things first.”  This means focusing on the activities that support our most important priorities and goals.

For many of us, however, we don’t have a clear idea of what our mission and goals are.  We live life day-to-day, pulled along by the circumstances that pop up every day.  The first step in the process of establishing focus is to create a personal plan.  This personal plan has three components:

• A mission statement.  Why am I here on earth?  How can I positively impact the world around me?  Hopefully, the mission of your “personal” plan is about much more than just your personal happiness.
   

• Strategies.  What are the strategies that will enable me to achieve my mission?  For example, if my mission is to have a positive impact on my family, business and community, one of my strategies might be to build more and better relationships with others.
   

• Goals.  What goals can I set to help me measure the success of the strategies I’m employing?  If I have a strategy to build more and better relationships with others, I may set goals to call one friend every week and get together for an extended period of time with a close friend every two weeks.  I may also want to set goals for building my network of business acquaintances, including specifying a certain number of “networking events” that I should attend each month.

The next step is to live a life of focus and mission by managing our daily task list so that it supports our goals, strategies and mission statement.  After all, if we just put the plan on a shelf and never revisit it, we’ll never achieve our goals.  In order to live a life of focus and mission, we need to:

Learn to say no.  I’m not implying that you should say “no” to everything; I’m saying that you should say “no” to activities that don’t support your most important priorities so that you can say “yes” to the ones that do.

Avoid distraction and focus on the people or task at hand.  It’s been estimated that the cost of an interruption is 2-3 times the length of that interruption.  Turn your email notification OFF so that the alarm doesn’t distract you from the work you are doing.  Block out time during which you will NOT take phone calls so that you can get work done (I always recommend using caller ID so that you can prioritize whether or not to take calls).  Similarly, unless you are expecting a super-important call, turn your cell phone OFF when you are meeting with people…it’s more productive and more polite!

 “Batch process” similar activities.  Borrowing a term from the computer industry, focused individuals learn to “batch” similar tasks together and complete those batched tasks as a group, rather than as the tasks present themselves.  For example, if I have an idea for a project that I’m working on, I don’t drop what I’m doing and follow through on the idea on the spot.  Rather, I write the idea down along with my other ideas for the project, and attack ALL of the ideas for the project at a time when I can really focus on the project.  As added benefits, by letting the ideas “sit” for awhile and then addressing them in a focused manner, I’m much better able to synthesize all of the ideas together and perhaps weed out some ideas that are not so good after all.

Keep an eye on balance.  It’s too easy to slip back into doing what’s easy and comfortable, at the expense of some of your other activities.  Take a step back every week – when you are reviewing your goals – to make sure that you are properly balancing your time and efforts between family, work, self and others.

Revisit your mission statement, strategies and goals on a regular basis.  Every day, you should re-prioritize your task list so that it supports your goals.  You should revisit your goals once a week to make sure that they are on track, valid and realistic.  This will also help you to maintain balance among your various activities.  Once a quarter, you should re-examine your strategies to ensure that they support your mission.  And once a year, you should reconsider your mission statement to make sure that it still holds true.  By stepping back for just a few minutes each day, week, quarter and year, you’ll be much better able to focus on the tasks that support your mission, strategy and goals.

There are reams of books on the topic of time management and focus, and in future newsletters we’ll cover some of those books.  In some ways, however, these books overwhelm the reader with so many tips and ideas that the importance of focus is lost in a forest of detail (in other words, not enough focus is being placed on focus).  We can accomplish lots more simply by focusing on creating a personal plan, occasionally revisiting that plan, and living a daily life of focusing on the activities that support our mission and goals.