By Michael Gidlewski

The single most important ingredient to a full life and a successful business is the ability to focus. The ability to concentrate all of your time, effort, energy, and thought exclusively on the business or task that you are engaged in at that moment.

In our work, we need to focus on our dreams, our goals, our principles, and our values. This will help us to be self-directed, self-managed, and self-motivated. The ability to stay in the present moment and focus is a critical success factor in everything you do.

We squander our focus by getting lost in a sea of distractions. Author and speaker Daniel Goleman said that scanning the landscape and choosing what to focus on and what to leave in the background is one of our greatest gifts. We have to decide where to focus our minds because technology and social media pulls us in every direction.

The great thing about modern life and living in an affluent society is we have many choices and can do many things. This can be a curse at times because we have too many choices and too many things we can do. We have to constantly prioritize and decide where we want our focus to be.

There are three primary barriers to focus that we want to help you overcome. These are clutter, noise, and poor planning.

Clutter comes in many forms from papers and items on our desks to thoughts racing in our heads. In either case, clutter is synonymous with disorganization. Clutter is not only a source of distraction by itself, but it breeds more distraction as we waste our time struggling to find things. Take some time to organize. Go through your desk, your office, your e-mails, your brain, and weed out what you don’t need. Simplify your workspace. Write down things you’ve been thinking about in a journal. Thoughts running around in our heads aren’t going to do much up there. You don’t have the time to get things in order? I’m telling you, you cannot afford to waste any more time throwing away your focus. Organize, prioritize, and limit the distractions in your immediate view.

Noise also is broad-reaching in definition, but all noise is a source of disturbance. If we want to stay focused, we need to eliminate the noise around us. We can close the door to our office and hang up a sign saying “Do Not Disturb.” I provide my clients with a door-hanger that reads Q2 High Payoff Activities. The goal is to spend all of your time on those activities that will provide you with the greatest return, personally and professionally. Don’t waste time and money getting distracted from this. Turn off your phone and stay off social networking sites and your e-mail inbox! Limit your interruptions and you will be amazed and how much you will accomplish.

Poor planning is the archenemy to focus. Block and lock your time! This means you need to designate time for each hour of your day to high-payoff activities and stick to your schedule. Download the Strategic Weekly Time Plan from our website to help with this. First, determine which goals you want to accomplish and then assign time blocks to the tasks necessary to achieve those goals. Then, don’t do anything else during those times except what is on your schedule. No matter how good we think we are at multi-tasking, we actually aren’t. The more we divide our attention, the less attention we give to each task exponentially and the less we accomplish.

Take some time to give these simple suggestions a try. You will be pleased with the outcome.

Next week, I will discuss a model for focusing energy.

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Michael Gidlewski is President of West Chester-based Achievement Unlimited, Inc., as well as a growth catalyst and motivational speaker. He works with motivated business owners and entrepreneurs to clearly define the elements of what they dearly want their businesses and lives to look like, then helps them connect all the moving parts that make up those visions to consistent action and habits. Michael can be reached at 610-793-6609 or via e-mail at michael@achievable.com.

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