No matter if you work for a company, or if you work from home and you are managing yourself, having no boss looking over your shoulder making sure you do the right things and get you on the right track, there are 4 key things you want to be aware of, and that you want to avoid. These will rob you of efficiency and effectiveness.
1) Multi-tasking
Most people right now are so busy, trying to do so many things at once, that they can’t focus on anything. Checking our e-mail, checking our Blackberry, our voicemail, and so many distractions. As it turns out, scientific studies show, multi-tasking is not very efficient, although many of these people say “I’m a multitask-er and I work fine like this.”
So if you multi-task, you wan to stop that and learn to focus on one thing at a time.
2) Distraction & Interruption
When we get distracted, it takes us something like 20 minutes to get back to the point we were at, right before we were distracted or interrupted. Most of us go around all day long going from one thing to the next, and at the
end of the day we are asking ourselves “Why didn’t I get anything done?” It’s because we allowed ourselves to get distracted, and we allowed ourselves to be interrupted.
You need to stop allowing yourself to get distracted and be interrupted, and you need to stop distracting and interrupting others.
3) Friction
Friction is an inefficiency that is caused by something not working smoothly, or something not supporting you. As an example, you sit down to start working, and you have a family member that you had a fight with, and you are upset about it. You’ve got emotional friction inside of you. Or if you don’t have a comfortable work environment, maybe it’s aloud and with people distracting you.
Where do you have friction in your life? Where do you have friction around you? You want to start eliminating these one by one, physical friction, emotional friction and psychological.
4) The “Monkey Mind”
That’s the most difficult. It’s the process that happens to most of us, when we have a thought, or we have a feeling that is triggered inside of us, it sets this whirlwind, or domino effect, of these others. If you have a thought that comes up, and then your mind runs away and starts thinking about a bunch of other things, it’s essentially the same as if someone walked into your office, and started a conversation with you, and caused you to stop doing what you were doing. Your mind just ran away.
Bottom line, you’ve got to let go of the idea that multitasking is efficicient, you’ve got to let go of distraction, of having your cellphone on with the text messages coming in, of having your e-mail browser open all the time and checking your e-mail all the time. You’ve got to come in and focus, build a supportive environment that allows you to really zoom in and narrowing on the thing you are working on, that doesn’t have a lot of friction in it, and that doesn’t trigger the monkey mind.
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