Did you know?
- The average white collar worker spends around 6 hours a day on email?
- 80% of smart phone users never leave their home without their smartphone?
- People check their smartphone on average 110 times a day, some as much as 900 times?
- The average person now receives around 4000 marketing messages a day, a nearly 700% increase over the past 40 years.
- 58% of adults check their emails first thing in the morning
Welcome to the new digital world of distractions and much
like 88% of New Year’s resolutions, they will lead you to failure in
2016…unless you can learn how to focus!
Like it or not, your world is increasingly full of
distractions pulling us in all different directions. Do you have a hard time
focusing when you are reading? Do you have a hard time holding a conversation
without the urge to check your smartphone? Can you vacation without your
smartphone at your side? Do you have to Google the answer to many questions you
receive? These may be symptoms of, as Nicholas
Carr indicates, your body’s development of an “interruption system” whereby
we trade off concentration and focus for instant and constant information flow.
Many working adults, including myself, have developed this
problem recently in our lives. And here is the scary part; we did not initially
grow up with smart phones while most of our children now do. This problem will
only get worse.
In
my book THE TOP 20%, I write about the important aspects of successfully
dealing with distractions and finding focus in your business life through the
use of goals. As a business professional,
the greatest advantage goals provide
you with is focus. The top 20 percent want to achieve great results and the
best way to accomplish this is by defining goals and staying laser-focused on
them. Good business goals should be reasonable, achievable, written,
executable, and mutually agreed upon by all involved. In developing a
laser-focus on defined goals, successful professionals are not only able to
focus in on what they want, but they are also able to effectively remove all of
the competing priorities and obstacles that potentially stand in their way.
Failing professionals treat sales goal setting in a similar
manner to how the 88 percent of us treat a New Year’s Resolution—we make a
declaration of an objective at the start of each year and then drift back into our
bad habits and results. The primary reason for this failure is a lack of
personal accountability. A goal without
accountability in nothing more than a dream. Most professionals today will
commonly create their annual goals and then never follow up on those goals
throughout the course of the year with the good habits needed to successfully execute them.
When it comes to business professionals, it is important to
understand that inspiration and desire is what may have gotten you started in
your career, but it is your habits that
will keep you going and make you successful. Habits are inherently no
different than business systems, since habits
are systems you create for yourself. Just as you cannot run and scale a
business without systems, you equally cannot grow your own productivity without
good habits.
The problem with habits are in developing the “right” habits
versus the wrong habits. We train both our muscles and our minds to behave in
certain habitual manners based on known stimuli and activities ranging from
sitting at a PC, standing in lines, checking our email, sitting at traffic
lights, etc. Unfortunately for many of us today, this stimuli tends to be
distractions and pauses in activity – we are developing habits to fill our time
and heads with increasing levels of information…most of which has nothing to do
with our goals. This is no different than walking into a room and then
forgetting why you walked there to begin with.
Sound familiar?
The best way to reach
any annual goal is to break it down into daily activities. Without a daily
focus, people are left with weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual measurements
that in most cases are too late to effectively measure and manage. This is why
you as an individual need to take this upon yourself.
Finally, in order to be successful you also need to be
able to say “NO” to any competing goals and distractions that can
come your way – no matter how attractive they may seem. This can include saying
“NO” to taking and dealing with bad customers, “NO” to taking business that can
remove you and your business from your primary goals and objectives, and “NO” to
time-robbers like constantly checking social media to see what “everybody else”
is doing, etc.
Other ways successful business professionals I know have
removed distractions is by setting defined reading times each day, setting daily
time intervals for when they will check and receive emails, working out
regularly, eating better, and taking regular technology-free vacations.
What else works for you? Let us know…
To learn more about how you can help make 2016 your most successful year ever, visit our publications on Amazon.com:
#newyears #newyearsresolution #focus
