The Working With... Podcast | Episode 56 | How To Stay Focused On The Important Things In Your Life.
11/19/18 • 10 min
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to stay focused on the important things.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With... Podcast Previous episodes page
The Annual Planning Worksheet can be downloaded here
Where’s Your Anchor? Blog Post
Productivity Mastery Series | Where’s Your Anchor?
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 56 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about focus and how to stay focused on the important things without allowing yourself to be distracted by all the unimportant things that go on around us every day.
Before we dive in to this week’s question, though, I just like to tell you I have been preparing a number of fantastic offers for this coming weekend’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The first of which will be an exclusive “secret sale” launching on Thursday for all of you who are enrolled in my Learning Centre. If you are not already enrolled, then get yourself enrolled in my FREE Beginners Guide to Creating Your Own COD system so you can be involved in this very special secret sale.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means handing you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Amanda. Amanda asks: Carl, how do you stay focused on your goals and plans on a daily basis. I really struggle with this.
Thank you Amanda for your question. I think this is another question many of you will also be wondering about.
Well, the first thing is you need to have identified what exactly is important to you. If you do not know what is important you will always be feeling you are not moving forward with your life. You will feel you are just going through the motions and not getting anything important done. Establishing what is important to you, and what is not, is the first step. Of course it is not an easy step. There is so much going on in our lives and there is so much going on at work that it is very hard to know what is important and what is not. One thing I can tell you is that other people’s urgencies are definitely not your important tasks. Important tasks for you need to come from you. Not your boss, your family or your friends. They must come from you.
One way to discover what is important to you is to ask a very simple question and spend a few minutes thinking about your answer. That question is:
If I had complete control over what I will do tomorrow, what would I do?
Now there are two different times you should ask this question. When you are at work and when you are at home. Ask this question before you finish at workplace everyday and write out what you would do, and again, ask this question on a Friday night and write down you answer.
The answers you come up with may not necessarily be what you can work on, but somewhere in the list of things you write down you will see a theme developing. That theme is where you should be spending your time.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say on a Sunday night you sit down and ask the question. You write down things like:
- Finish presentation for Thursday’s symposium
- Prepare for Wednesday’s conference call
- Ask HR about how many holiday days I have left this year
Once you have a list like this, get them into your to-do list manager and flag them. These are your priorities for tomorrow.
Now if your list contains more than three or four things, you are going to have to slim down the list. This is where you will have to become a bit ruthless. This is quite hard to do at first, but our brains have a very bad habit of convincing us we can do more than we can in any period of twenty-four hours. And we also have to accept there is going to be some form of a crisis that will require our attention. We do not work in a bubble.
If you want to get really good at this you should go into full ruthless mode and restrict these things to just two. When you do that, you start making sure that the two things you choose as your objectives are truly important to yo...
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to stay focused on the important things.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With... Podcast Previous episodes page
The Annual Planning Worksheet can be downloaded here
Where’s Your Anchor? Blog Post
Productivity Mastery Series | Where’s Your Anchor?
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 56 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about focus and how to stay focused on the important things without allowing yourself to be distracted by all the unimportant things that go on around us every day.
Before we dive in to this week’s question, though, I just like to tell you I have been preparing a number of fantastic offers for this coming weekend’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The first of which will be an exclusive “secret sale” launching on Thursday for all of you who are enrolled in my Learning Centre. If you are not already enrolled, then get yourself enrolled in my FREE Beginners Guide to Creating Your Own COD system so you can be involved in this very special secret sale.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means handing you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Amanda. Amanda asks: Carl, how do you stay focused on your goals and plans on a daily basis. I really struggle with this.
Thank you Amanda for your question. I think this is another question many of you will also be wondering about.
Well, the first thing is you need to have identified what exactly is important to you. If you do not know what is important you will always be feeling you are not moving forward with your life. You will feel you are just going through the motions and not getting anything important done. Establishing what is important to you, and what is not, is the first step. Of course it is not an easy step. There is so much going on in our lives and there is so much going on at work that it is very hard to know what is important and what is not. One thing I can tell you is that other people’s urgencies are definitely not your important tasks. Important tasks for you need to come from you. Not your boss, your family or your friends. They must come from you.
One way to discover what is important to you is to ask a very simple question and spend a few minutes thinking about your answer. That question is:
If I had complete control over what I will do tomorrow, what would I do?
Now there are two different times you should ask this question. When you are at work and when you are at home. Ask this question before you finish at workplace everyday and write out what you would do, and again, ask this question on a Friday night and write down you answer.
The answers you come up with may not necessarily be what you can work on, but somewhere in the list of things you write down you will see a theme developing. That theme is where you should be spending your time.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say on a Sunday night you sit down and ask the question. You write down things like:
- Finish presentation for Thursday’s symposium
- Prepare for Wednesday’s conference call
- Ask HR about how many holiday days I have left this year
Once you have a list like this, get them into your to-do list manager and flag them. These are your priorities for tomorrow.
Now if your list contains more than three or four things, you are going to have to slim down the list. This is where you will have to become a bit ruthless. This is quite hard to do at first, but our brains have a very bad habit of convincing us we can do more than we can in any period of twenty-four hours. And we also have to accept there is going to be some form of a crisis that will require our attention. We do not work in a bubble.
If you want to get really good at this you should go into full ruthless mode and restrict these things to just two. When you do that, you start making sure that the two things you choose as your objectives are truly important to yo...
Previous Episode
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The Working With... Podcast | Episode 55 | Planning The New Year With Kevin Blackburn [Part 2]
In this second part of my chat with Kev Blackburn of Life Success Engineer, we continue discussing goal planning and 2019.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With... Podcast Previous episodes page
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
Life Success Engineer YouTube Channel
The Annual Planning Worksheet can be downloaded here
Hello and welcome to episode 55 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this second part of my special goal planning and 2019 episode, Kev Blackburn, THE Life Success Engineer and I discuss a few goal planning tips and tricks that will help you make 2019 your best year yet.
So, sit back, enjoy, be inspired and we continue where we left off.
Next Episode
The Working With... Podcast | Episode 57 | How To Stop Procrastinating.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to stop procrastinating and get the work done.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With... Podcast Previous episodes page
My 2018 Black Friday / Cyber Monday offers
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 57 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, the question is all about procrastination and how to overcome this real productivity conundrum. It affects us all and it can do a lot of damage to our careers, relationships and goals.
But before we get into this week’s question, I want to tell you all about my fantastic Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale. There are some fantastic offers available for you and I would love you to get yourself a bargain while you can. I have bundles of courses, including the brilliant Pathway To Productivity, AND... I am also offering 12 Months of weekly one on one coaching with me personally at half price. Those places are very limited, so if you want to get yourself in, you need to go to my website right now and book yourself a place and save yourself $600!
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks, Carl, I really struggle to get things done. Whenever I sit down to do some work I find myself procrastinating by flicking through Instagram or watching your videos on YouTube. Do you have any advice on stopping this?
Thank you, Tim, Not sure I want to stop you watching my videos though! Anyway, to answer your question this is something I know many people have difficulties with. I too, from time to time, find myself procrastinating and it can really hinder the work I want to do for the day. The good news is there are a few strategies you can use to stop you from flicking through Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
The first one is to have a plan for the day. We often find ourselves procrastinating when we have unclear plans for the day. If you turn up to work with no plan you will spend the first part of the day thinking about what to do and that is when social media and unimportant work shouts the loudest. It’s human nature to turn away from the hardest work and move towards the easier work. If you have no plan, the unimportant will be shouting at you and you will not do the important. This is one of the many reasons why I recommend you do the Golden Ten at the end of the day and not in the morning. When you wake up in the morning with a clear idea of what you want to accomplish that day you are much more likely to get it done.
And that leads me on to the second tip. Don’t set yourself too much to do. Another reason why we get drawn to procrastination is because when we look at our to-do list for the day it is too long. It becomes overwhelming and overwhelm often leads to procrastination. I have been recommending that you do not have more than ten things on your daily to-do list each day for a long time. Now that might not seem very much, but every day you are going to have crises, demands from bosses and customers and you are going to have to deal with them. If you only have ten or fewer items on your to-do list you will have time to deal with the crises as well as get your planned work done. That creates a circle of success. The more days you complete your planned tasks, the more focused you will become on completing those tasks. It’s a case of you not wanting to break the chain and you become determined to get your work done.
How you write out your tasks is also a way to prevent procrastination. If you write tasks out that are unclear, such as, “Shopping”, “dog food” or “Wife’s birthday”, you will procrastinate. Sometimes you will remember what it was you meant when you wrote that task, other times you will not. If the task is something like “write report” that will guarantee you will procrastinate because although it is just two words, the work involved is unclear and you will resist. Far better to write tasks such as “Buy dog food for Barney” or “research gift ideas for wife’s birthday” for the report break it down. You could create three of four tasks such as:
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