I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to stay focused and remain productive. We all know that doing what you love reverse engineers productivity. If you love what you do, you’ll obviously be more compelled to do it, rather than trying to place a productivity system on top of undesirable work.
But sometimes even that’s not enough. It’s easy to get sucked into the minutiae of life and lose focus. It’s easy to spend the majority of your time feeling productive, when most of what you’re doing won’t make a difference a week, a day or an hour from now. Some examples of this productivity illusion include:
- Spending inordinate amounts of time checking and responding to email.
- Organizing your desk for 3 hours a day.
- Detailing, updating, and maintaining calendars and to-do lists more than you actually work.
- Reading books, articles and blogs to learn and find inspiration, but not actually spending any time doing anything.
The Minutiae Vacuum
One of the most effective ways I’ve found to manage my time is to think about your work in terms of impact. By splitting your time up in between A, B and C tasks, it’s easier to get a handle on what is most important and how much time you’re spending spinning your wheels. A tasks are things that have a long term impact, 6 months to a year or more. B tasks are things that are important, but don’t have as much of a long term impact. They might range between 1-6 months. Finally, C level tasks are things that need to be done on a daily or weekly basis, but don’t have much of an impact outside of that time frame. So here’s the break down:
A - 50% or more of your day.
B - 30% of the day.
C - 20% of the day.
Now that we have a framework of where our time is spent most critically, the question is, how do we remain focused on the high-level, long term impact tasks? How do we keep ourselves out of the seemingly urgent, but unimportant vacuum?
Vision Maintenance
The answer I’ve found to best remain focused on the important is vision maintenance. By spending time daily reflecting and meditating on what is most important to you, you can remain centered on meaningful and crucial work.
Daily vision maintenance can come in many forms:
- Meditating on your values, goals and aspirations.
- Sitting with a fresh cup of coffee or tea thinking about how you want to plan your day.
- Spending time thinking about your intentions, what you want and what it will take to get there.
- Journaling about how you feel about your current situation, what successes you’ve made, what you can learn from and what you can do differently to improve.
- Running, walking or exercise thinking about where you want to be in your life.
My favorite thing to do is meditate on my values and goals early in the morning. From time to time I also greatly benefit from writing an journal entry on my private blogger account. This is usually when I’m feeling considerably stuck in a certain area, or I feel like my life is not congruent with my values. I also get some of my best ideas while walking, so I try to keep a pad of paper and pen handy in my pocket.
I know this type of re-aligning and re-focusing myself internally is essential to staying on track and keeping focused on what’s important. But despite knowing this, I have a tendency to get caught up in the unimportant and the urgent. I’ll often rationalize to myself that spending my time doing things that will produce immediate tangible results is more important than taking the time to re-focus and evaluate. I think this is the biggest mental block we face in making the time to do vision maintenance. We think that doing something that produces results immediately trumps doing something that doesn’t manifest anything instantaneously.
In reality, this is the furthest thing from the truth. When I take the time to meditate and review my goals, to journals and reflect I’m twice as productive than when I’m simply reacting to whatever I feel is most productive at the time.
So in closing, I’d just like to share with you a photo of the place I like to meditate. I like to walk up the to Colorado Street Bridge and just clear my mind. There is an amazing view stretching out for about 20 miles covered in trees and growing things. Sometimes I’ll come up here when I’m looking for inspiration or when I’m stuck on the evolution of a particular idea. It helps me clear my mind and re-focus on what really matters: living.
Having a place where you meditate or reflect on your goals and dreams can really help you stay focused. It’s kind of a like a dream sanctuary.
Do you have trouble staying focused on what really matters? Do you find that it’s difficult to maintain your vision, or justify spending the time doing vision and reflection type work? Let’s start a discussion, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Jonathan is the author of the blog Illuminated Mind. He writes about finding Authenticity, Clarity and Balance in all aspects of living. His articles include Living Freestyle; Life Without a Template and The Cult of Productivity. You can subscribe to his blog here.
Image by DerrickT.
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Great post! Productivity is a vastly misused and misinterpreted idea. If we are to be truly productive, we should begin the process of productivity by defining what it is that we want to produce.
If we begin by saying, “I want to be more productive,” we have accomplished nothing. We should begin by asking, “What do I want to produce?” This is where your idea of “vision” becomes important…
Self-awareness is also crucial. Often, as you mentioned in the post, we look for inspiration in books, blogs, and other various media sources. The paradox in this behavior is that we become more distracted and find ourselves following in the path of others rather than creating our own path. We may help ourselves in the current moment but a book or blog will not help us in the next moment.
There is a difference between a “state” and a “trait.” A state is short-term, such as a pleasure or euphoria, and a trait is long-term, such as a habit or mindfulness. This is where your idea of “meditation” becomes important.
Thanks for the thoughts…
Great post! I always feel that any time I spend seriously thinking about: (1) where I am today; (2) how I got here; (3) what my goals were for this period in my life, say starting from a year ago; (3) are those still my goals now; and, (4) what are the most sensible ways for me (as opposed to anyone else) to achieve my continuing/new goals as quickly as possible — which may mean, in a lot of cases, not as quickly as others.
Whenever I find myself floundering in my tasks, or temporarily disoriented in my goals, I ask myself any combination of the above questions, and I usually find my bearings within 15 minutes. I always take notes of these meetings with myself and keep them all in one, easy-to-access place. That way I can compare my notes, identify patterns, and better analyze what all of it means for me in the big picture of my life goals.
I know I’m done with this type of self meeting when I feel that conviction again in my heart and see the vision clearly of where to go from here. Thanks again for a very useful post!
Great post, it’s so important to take time to visualize where you want to be. Staying focussed is one of the key ingredients in being successful or not.
Another important lesson I learned in life is all about priorities. I’ve found that the best way to manage my time (and my stress) has been to focus on things that really matter. It’s about knowing what I absolutely have to do and what can either be postponed, delegated, or done away with altogether. It’s about knowing what to take seriously and what to let slide. It’s about taking care of the big things so the little ones take care of themselves and the really little ones don’t bother me at all.
hmm! thanks, usefull
love this! very helpful and inspiring. As an A.D.D kid focus and concentration are not my greatest attributes. I can definitely identify with all of those examples of the illusion of productivity
I find that often we perceive meditating, reviewing, and reflecting as “taking time out.” That couldn’t be farther from the truth. These are essential elements of moving forward. Unfortunately, we tend to assume that we have to be physically doing something (like, as you said, answering emails or organizing our desks) that we think we’re contributing to our goals.
Just looking at meditation, it’s a way to increase our focus, concentration, observation, creativity, memory and energy levels - now that’s got to be good for productivity!
Thanks for the post - well done!
@ The Financial Philosopher: Exactly. It’s about staying focused and actually knowing what we want, what our goal is. If we have some arbitrary goal like “be more happy” or “be more productive” that’s not going to do much for us. We’ll also be likely to do things to make us more happy and more productive that contradict what we really want.
@ Shanel: Asking yourself questions is great too, it forces you to think. Have you made that a habit when you’re in a particularly difficult situation?
I see some good truth in you post, good work my friend!
Knowing where you want to go, what you want to accomplish is fundamental to success. I find I can’t accomplish much until I see how it can be done.
I think of productivity as getting more done in the same amount of time, maybe a little different from your definition. One thing that has been coming to me on that front is to Do One Thing. Multi-tasking and distractions are of the devil. The web is awesome, but is also the best distraction engine in the world.
Ron
http://www.distinctionsforlife.tv/
Jonathan,
Your post hits home with me, especially the point about reading books, etc. for inspiration but not doing anything. I’m fighting that temptation right now as I’m writing my book. Part of me feels like I have to read what everybody has written on the subject before I can proceed. Thus, I’ve surrounded myself with all the major books on my genre, plus spent a disproportionate amount of time in the libraries and bookstores.
My coach shared a quote from Zig Ziglar that has helped shake me out of this stuck place: “Don’t wait for all the lights to turn green before leaving town.”
Your post has helped emphasize the importance of vision maintenance and finding a dream sanctuary. I especially love the term “dream sanctuary,” a place where your dreams and goals are safe and can be stirred and rejuvenated whenever you want.
Thanks so much.
Hi Flora,
Sometimes it’s really difficult for me to draw the line between thinking about something and doing it. Or research and planning vs. implementation.
I really like that quote you’ve mentioned though, it’s particularly relevant for me right now.
I’m probably going to write an article about building a dream sanctuary soon. Stay tuned. =)
[…] How to Stay Focused: Vision Maintenance and the Minutiae Vacuum […]
Great post, I loved the idea of the sanctuary. I agree that you need ‘your place’, a place where you feel totally at ease and free from the worries of everyday life, and where it’s easier to reflect deeper on what you really want.
Thanks for this!
Jonathan,
Thanks for a great article… and great closing questions!
I’ve found that my larger goals have: (1) been with me a long time; and (2) have evolved as I have evolved, but despite the changes that growth brings, the core of the goals have stayed the same and those cores have also been with me a long time. So, I wonder if the procrastination is a twisted way of keeping familiar mind-companions (goals, visions, etc.) close to me? Kinda like the author that dreads writing the last sentence of her book ’cause she doesn’t want the internal process to be over. When a vision/dream actually MANIFESTS, it’s no longer in the private confines of our mind/heart, but it’s now an active, public, possibly living thing. And we interact with it differently. The trick for me is remembering that the new outward interaction is precisely what I want… so I must stop keeping it out of my own reach with time-wasting, counterproductive acts!
Again, thanks for creating a space and forum that allowed me to ramble my way to a better-feeling place
I agree that using books or blogs or whatever external source is not enough to get inspired or motivated on the long run.It can be used for short term just to trigger your motivational mechanism.However,to keep yourself motivated and hence,focused you need to develope a self-built motivational system.
To stay focused on your goal,I have found that the best way is to clearly identify and breakdown the tasks that is needed to get the goal accomplished as a number of consequent steps like directions for a place or directions written in a “manual user guide” of an electronic device.
Also,creating a ” work breakdown structure”can be so helpful.That is to breakdown your tasks into small pieces of work and identify clearly the time,resources and effort needed to complete each minor task.This helps greatly to stay focused and always know what you have to do and when.
Good tips, it’s especially important to reflect on our values, and tie those with our goals and daily habits. Then, whenever you aren’t sticking with a habit or goal, you can think back to the value and say “oh yeah, that’s why I’m doing this” and get a recharge of energy.
I’ve found Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Workweek has another good tip on productivity- write down the 2 most important things you need to do the next day, and then make sure you do those that day, and don’t multi-task. This helps you stay focused and it’s amazing how much you can get done over time by just doing those two things each day.