It’s easy to get off track and lose focus. Here are some of the ways I have been attempting to sharpen my focus and execution.

Highlights

  • Time Warrior: How to defeat procrastination, people-pleasing, self-doubt, over-commitment, broken promises and chaos by Steve Chandler
    • Creating vs. Managing
  • Advanced Client Systems (ACS) program hosted by Steve Chandler
  • The Prosperous Coach: Increase Income and Impact for You and Your Clients by Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin
  • Three primary leaks I’m seeing steal my focus
    • Email
    • News
    • Social Media
  • Where do you waste time across a day?
  • Being conscious and intentional about the things I work on
  • Choosing “now” or “not now”
    • Once an email is open it has to be dealt with
    • You don’t leave your physical mail opened in your mailbox
  • The power of turning the email preview pane window off
    • Saves all kinds of distractions
    • Easier to delete junk
  • Thunderbird for email
  • Move tasks that are living in your inbox to your task management system
  • Managing all my tasks in Trello
    • Subscribe to the board (to get notifications)
    • Set due dates on important cards– email comes and I don’t delete it until I’ve dealt with the card
  • Setting up simple website blocking with entries to /etc/hosts
  • Using podcasts listening to get the news without the distractions
  • Scaling back social media noise
    • Cleaning up my follower list on Twitter
    • Turning off notification for Facebook group postings (reduces email)
    • LinkedIn
      • I would love to see more personal stuff here and less boring corporate blog posts about the latest product release
  • My archiving strategy and space saving with Dropbox
  • De-cluttering computer files
  • Be on the lookout for leaks in your own life

What can you do to plug the leaks and focus your time on things that matter?

Credits

All songs licensed under Creative Commons