You are constantly being distracted. Your phone dings and off you go. Your email alert sounds and down another rabbit hole you go. We keep finding more and more ways to receive information but rarely think about our why or what we should be doing with it. It seems that all of these new productivity tools can actually hurt our productivity. So here are five tips to improve your productivity and results by finding your FOCUS.
F - First Things First Stephen Covey wrote a book by that title with the challenge to get us to think about things in four quadrants: 1) Important and Urgent; 2. Important, Not Urgent; 3. Urgent, Not Important and 4. Not Urgent, Not Important. Determine what is most important and most urgent and take care of those tasks first. Learn to stay out of number 3 and number 4 until your Important Tasks are completed.
O - Objectives. Do you know your goals? Did you set any goals for this year, this quarter, this month, this week, this day? An amazing number of us go through life without taking the time to write our future. You write your future by setting your specific, measureable, acheiveable, relevant and time-bound goals. As the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
C - Consistency. The only road to success is to make success a habit. The only way to create a habit is to do the right thing every day and every time. This meets the #1 test of Urgent and Important. If you’re serious about doing more and getting more from your life, you must be consistent. For me this has meant to put important self-improvement activities on my calendar. Make an appointment with yourself to plan, to meditate, to think, to strategize and to do the important things first.
U - Understand. Understand yourself. Understand your own little habits that undermine your efforts. Understand your why. When you know why you’re doing what you do, it makes the road clearer, decisions easier and helps you stay on course. You free yourself to be your best self and to live out the unique you. You’ll get comfortable and that is attractive because you are more real. And people like working with people who are real.
S - Single-Tasking. Too many of us like to brag about our ability to multi-task. It’s not something to be particularly proud of. Prioritize your list of tasks and then knock them off one-by-one. There’s not much that is more satisfying than a piece of paper with multiple tasks marked as complete - one by one by one. Turn off all distractions and get each one done.
Paul Kiewiet MAS+ is an industry speaker, writer, consultant and coach. He serves as the executive director of MiPPA. Kiewiet was inducted into the PPAI Hall of Fame and the MiPPA Hall of Fame. He served as Chairman of PPAI in 2007. A former distributor, he founded Promotion Concepts, Inc in 1982 and worked with some of America’s most valuable brands including Coca-Cola, Kelloggs, and Whirlpool.