Focusing on the right thing.
This time I want to remind you about the Eisenhover Matrix that you see on the picture above.
How often during a regular day do you lift your head up and check what are you working on?
Are you doing the most important and urgent thing you could be doing right now?
If you are like me, you probably caught yourself up doing urgent but unimportant things or even worse doing not important and not urgent things too during your day (hello YouTube, TikTok and the like) :). All too often the Worker inside you starts doing something and then it’s hard to stop. You are being carried away with everything that must be done, one thing leading to another with no end.
Many hours later you discover that you have done a lot of urgent work, but that strategic thing, that can potentially make a huge impact on your business is still not started. You tell yourself that what you have done is still important because it was urgent and hope to start doing that strategic thing tomorrow. But the story repeats the next day again and again. I definitely suffer from this evil pattern.
I have found different approaches how to deal with this situation. One is exactly the matrix from the picture in this post, when you assign all the tasks that you need to do to one of the corners of the matrix. Some even say that you should start with the upper left types of task the very first thing in the morning. That never worked for me :(. I don’t like going through all tasks (I do keep them in OmniFocus) and assigning them those 4 types. And even if I start working min the right one, I am too easily distracted into something else by a phone call, or e-mail, or just by looking out the window and then the day is gone before I know it.
So now I am testing another strategy. I put a timer for 25 minutes (yeah, those pomodoros you probably heard about) and start working on the most important and most urgent item that I have. Who the bell rings, I take a short break (stand up and stretch, go drink a glass of water, wc, etc) and on my return ask myself a few questions: “Is this the most important and urgent thing I should be doing right now? Should I continue what I have been doing before the break?”
Tell me what is your strategy on staying focused on the right thing in the comments?
