What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do by Laura Stack

Author:Laura Stack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2012-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

SUMMARY: PWF STEP 3 CHECKUP

You can achieve true productivity only when you hone your ability to focus to razor sharpness.

For most of us, distractions represent our biggest productivity hurdles. External distractions are bad enough, but at least you can escape from most of those: for example, by closeting yourself away from others, by establishing signals letting people know when they shouldn’t disturb you, and by ignoring e-mail and phone calls until you have time to deal with them.

Internal distractions are much more insidious, since your own mind creates them—and you can’t easily escape yourself. Self-discipline is your watchword here. Look closely at your workday, determine which activities waste your time, and make rules to control them. Enforce those rules aggressively, especially guarding against the following activities:

• Multitasking

• Procrastinating

• Perfectionism

• Negative self-talk

• Socializing

Taken together, these things can steal hours from your workday. The worst culprit may be multitasking, because it fools you into thinking you’ve accomplished a lot, when you’ve really just kept yourself busy. Instead of haphazardly trying to do ten things at once, focus on one activity until you’ve completed it, and then move on to the next one.

Too many of us jump whenever our smartphones, hand-helds, e-mail, and other techno-tools tell us to, and we pay for it with lapses in productivity. If you’ve fallen prey to this habit, slip the electronic leash. Constant connection to the info-world can damage your productivity.

Enlist focus aids to help you maintain the thread of your daily productivity. Write down or otherwise record ideas as they occur to you, so you don’t interrupt yourself to pursue a shiny new thought when you should be doing something else. Harness metacognition to help you understand how you think, so you can better head off distractions while fine-tuning your focus; and if you think it may help, try ambient sound to insulate you from external distraction.

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