How I Stay Focused for More Than 4 Hours a Week
I’m a simplifier — constantly trying to simplify things — focus more time on fewer things. As CEO and a father of 3 soon to be 4 kids, it’s helped to get fairly good at it. There are just too many moving pieces to not be.
There are endless number of books on productivity. I just read (skimmed!) “The 4-Hour Workweek”. It seems the common thread in books like this is to work less by writing a book telling others how to work less. Unfortunately I don’t see this as realistic for most people. The author seems like a bit of a huckster too so take that for what it’s worth.
Here are some of the tactics that work for me:
- Understand the difference between being productive versus being busy. It’s easy to be busy. Much harder to be productive and know the difference.
- Throw out / recycle most everything. Lets you focus on the few things that matter. Hard to do with kids and a pack rat of a wife … but I’m trying
- Make to-do lists for the day. It helps me prioritize and stay focused.
Here are some more specific recommendations:
- Quit Facebook. Major time suck. I did this at the beginning of this year and feel much better for it. We lived many a year without it so life will go on if I don’t know every detail of everyone else’s lives.
- Remove all Twitter apps. Tweetdeck, Twitteriffic, etc … from your desktop or dock. Easy to confuse keeping with everyone’s tweets with being productive. Use it at select moments during the day. Life is too short to fritter it away on this.
- Remove those “you received an email alert.” Again, move away from distracted oriented things.
- Shred all receipts and bills (after paying them.) You can get most everything online anyway. It’s easier to focus when you have less stuff.
- Concentrate certain types of meetings on particular days. I get a fair amount of meeting requests from potential investors. Instead of scattering the check-in calls throughout the month, I started scheduling them to occur on a particular day in a given month. I would much rather have one day completely booked with my investor hat on versus having to disperse my thinking across a number of days.
So try them out or call me crazy. Either way, I’m always looking for new ways to minimize distractions in my life and focus on fewer things better. If you have additional suggestions, I would love to hear them.
No related posts.
I would argue that Twitter has a unique position in the online world to connect you with people of great influence and can be extremely productive. I’ve learned more than I care to tell from Twitter in a short period of time. Facebook on the other hand, I agree, a waste of time.
Curtailing your time goofing off and having the will power to focus is different than removing online connectivity from your life altogether.
Social media is here to stay. Dip your toe in once in a while at least
One more recommendation for staying focused:
Every Sunday or Monday take up to 15 min to think about the ultimate goals for the next week and then write them down and put them in front of you desk. If you are very visual you can draw a symbol for each goal in 3 different sheets of paper and put them in front of you. Then during the week, every time you feel you are getting distracted, just turn your head up and look at the 3 goals (drawings).
Rory …. agreed. I think that social media is very powerful. It’s not about living in a cave — just a matter of you dictating it versus the other way around. Life is more than jumping from distraction to distraction and if you really look at the very successful people out there in the world, most of them are stars at focusing on few things and doing them well. Thanks for the LinkedIn connection too.
Thanks for the comment Victor.
I’m not doing much with drawing to prioritize but I do carve out some time every Sunday night to frame my priorities for the week.
Appreciate the Twitter follow too. At some point, I’ll blog on my Twitter following / followers strategy. It still needs some work.
Great post and very relevant to me personally.
A good friend of mine suggested I read this so I just picked up the digital version the other night and dove in. Ironically, and in juxtaposition to you, he and another good friend of mine who replied after he saw I was reading it m(yes, via Twitter) mentioned it changed their life. They are married and have kids (yes, plural), so I would say that this book at least touches some people in a prophetic way.
Again, I’m only a few chapters in, but the thing that strikes me is the “New Rich” and the idea of retirement. I don’t agree that retirement has to suck with you either being poor, bored, or poor and bored so spend everything now to enjoy instant gratification. But, I also see that with the current economic conditions the way they are and the old paradigm of employers “taking care of their own” in their elderly ages having vanished, there has to be an individually driven need to enjoy life and capture enough money to live comfortably later when you can’t work (or don’t want to…I really hope I’m not bagging groceries at 80). There has to be some middle ground – which this book seems to ignore by just going to extremes (akin to CrushIT!).
So, we’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll continue working my 40+ hrs a week and seeing if the 4 HR Workweek soaks in and changes my lifestyle design.
-Chris
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Good points. I can see that.
I had the fortunate opportunity to start my career doing something very different — teaching on a tropical island for the peace corps. One of the nice things is that it gave me the time to really think through the purpose of work and life. I really do believe that most people move from distraction to distraction and forget the things that really matter — to me, what really matters is not a completing a bucket list — becoming a tango champion, climbing everest — but connecting better with people on a day to day basis. It is the pillar of happiness. So it has more to do with how you go about doing something versus what you are doing. Of course, pitching people a story of a tropical island, no-worries-living sells books and sounds great but ultimately it is shallow. And, whatever holes you have your life follow you regardless of the location. Even living on a tropical island gets boring and frustrating after a while … like with everything, the vacation ends and life starts.
Like with all things, there are definitely truths in there but I’m always a bit skeptical of people who describe contentment in terms of things and places versus something deeper. My in-laws have a old picture with sayings on their kitchen wall. One of the sayings says “a happy man is one who needs nothing.” (or something like that.) I think that there’s some truth to that.
Now let’s get back to working until we retire….
Joe