What to Do When You Lose Focus
Posted by Rhiannon Louise on July 26, 2007
Filed Under General Stuff
Sometimes in life there are a million distractions all competing for your attention at once and only if you’re fortunate to be able to be single minded can you blot out the noise and focus on the task at hand.
Mother’s are quite good at this – they can ignore general background child related noise and get on with a task – but sometimes the shouting gets too loud, too frenzied or stops altogether and jolts even the most concentrated mother’s mind away from the job in hand!
Even for those of you who are exceptionally good at staying focused and single-tasking, (just men usually!), there may well come a time when you have so many pressing work related issues, so many demands on your professional time and maybe even a hundred ideas buzzing round in your brain about what to do next to promote your brand, please your readership or just increase your profits that you lose all focus altogether.
Here are just a few ways that you can cope if you find yourself in such a place.
First things first it pays to bring to the front of your mind a picture of an elephant.
No, I’m serious….
Picture an elephant, picture a knife and fork and then ask yourself – ‘how do you eat an elephant?’
The answer is of course, ‘one piece at a time.’
And that is how you need to approach things when you’ve temporarily entered headless chicken mode – someone has even written a book with the same title you know!
Get a pen, get paper, get away from your desk, away from the family, the phone and the outside world, take a deep breath and start making a list.
List out every single thing you have pulling at you right at the moment.
Write it down in any order whatsoever (if you prefer you can type this but only on a laptop with no internet connection, I don’t want you at your desk staring at piles of paperwork or quickly checking your email now!)
List out the emotional issues if there are any, the open questions, detail the pending jobs, the nagging administrative tasks and those ideas or questions that just keep floating round and round your head.
Get it out and get it down…
Now put the list down, go away, take the time to drink a coffee or a cold drink and only then come back, sit down and carefully look through the list.
Is every single thing that’s pulling your focus right now as important as the next thing?
I mean, would missing a conference call tonight with someone be worse than missing an important family dinner? Surely you could reschedule the call or simply ask the call leader to record the session for you and then listen to it the next day for example – and if that is impossible and your entire financial future hangs on this call, you need to explain this fact to your family who may well be disappointed but who love you, support you and ideally want you to be happy and successful!
What about taking your wife shopping is that more or less important that the open invoices to chase. If you’re shopping for things to furnish a new nursery maybe that’s more important that the invoices – but if we’re talking groceries surely your wife will understand that you need money to pay for them - therefore the invoices come first!
Give people some credit, give yourself some slack and begin to find a way through your list.
Where you can ask for help with a task just go and ask for help!
Where you can postpone a commitment in favour of something more important, postpone it.
Where there are too many work related questions open at the moment maybe you should consider two things - loyalty and proven profitability. I.e., be true and committed to those who have shown you loyalty in the past and focus more of your time on what has proved to be successful in the past - rather than ignoring that, hoping it’ll continue and going off and chasing the ever elusive ‘next big thing.’
And ultimately, remember that this state you’re in is only temporary. You can get back on top of things and chances are the state has actually been brought on by tiredness, by you trying to spread yourself too thin or by you trying to be too broad in your professional focus.
Learn from this period – learn to prioritise and learn about your priorities! If you can you’ll be less likely to lose all focus altogether again, and even if you do, you’ll know how to get back in control much more quickly.
Okay, so now I’m going to write my list!
