Focus on Success: How Do You Spend Your Time?

Let’s focus on how focus is key to career success. Four concepts contribute to success: Clarity, Intention, Attention and Focus. It’s worth spending a time thinking, planning and taking action on each element. I’ve been covering each in recent blog posts. and these elements are covered in detail by my co-authors and I in our book, “Do Eagles Just Wing It?”

Focus is about managing distractions and avoiding the things that tend to pull us off track.

We’ve all had the experience of being all excited about something, some new program or plan for improving our lives, but then life happens, inertia takes over, and all of a sudden we’re back where we started. We’ve lost our focus. Here are some ideas to help with that.

Until you actually track your activities during a day, you won’t know how much or how little time is actually spent on the things that count for your success. You won’t know if you’re focused on doing the right things or not.

First, Accountability Partners are a great help with this too. Maybe the biggest of all. They make a huge difference in avoiding distractions and keeping your focus. But here are a couple of other suggestions, too.

• Match task to time of day. For example: Create in morning. Meet mid-day. Do tasks in afternoon.
• Start paying attention to your choices. Track your activities throughout the day.

You know… when we’re talking about focus, we’re really talking about behavior. What are you actually doing? Is it in line with moving toward your Waypoints, the things that will indicate you’re on track toward your goals, toward success?

One very powerful thing you can do is start taking a look at the choices you’re making throughout your day. Set up a file or a journal or something. At the end of your day, take 10 minutes or so and just think through the choices you made.

• What was your focus?
• Did you do what you set out to do?
• Why or why not?
• How did it go?
• What does it tell you?
• Any changes to be made?
• Any patterns appearing?

Becoming more aware of your choices like this will tell you a lot about your tendencies toward distractions. It’s a powerful tool for staying focused and on track to success.

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