We all have a lot going on.
Family, work, home, money to earn, side-projects. Perhaps even a social life!
Many of us live in an almost constant state of overwhelm, starting a million tasks, finishing none. Getting distracted by newer, shinier things, more urgent-seeming jobs. Or simply scrolling or staring at a screen, because we can’t think where to begin. Or how.
“Arguably the most important skill is controlling your attention,” says James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. “This goes beyond merely avoiding distractions. The deeper skill is finding the highest and best use for your time, given what is important to you.
“More than anything else, controlling your attention is about being able to figure out what you should be working on and identifying what truly moves the needle.”
Choose just one focus each month
Once you factor in all your existing deadlines and commitments, there often isn’t a vast amount of time to work on anything else. So set yourself up for success in the time you do have, by focussing ruthlessly.
Each month, choose just one key task that will move an important project forward, improve your business or get an obstacle out of your way. And make that your priority, the task you move to whenever you have time.
Update a section of your website. Concentrate on one aspect of social media. Finish a grant application. Master new software. Create a new habit and bed it into your routines. Get a chunk of a creative project done.
To be clear, this isn’t instead of your usual work and responsibilities. It’s as well as. Which is why it’s so important to choose just one thing and actually do it, rather than trying to juggle 20 different tasks and completing none.
Can’t choose just one thing?
If you find it hard to narrow down to just one task, write down everything you currently have on your plate. Then be ruthless.
- Delegate anything you can. (Pass it over to family, friends, colleagues – or pay for the help you need.)
- Delete everything that’s to do with other people’s priorities or expectations, rather than what’s truly important to you. You can add these back in later, if they resurface and feel important. But for now, let go of them.
- Separate all those niggling little jobs that only take a few minutes to do, and block out an hour a week on your calendar, to get these done. Turn it into a game, ticking them off your list as you do them – with some sort of reward at the end of the hour.
- Now look at what’s left, and choose your one thing for the month using the focussing question below. (It’s from Gary Keller’s book The ONE Thing, which I discuss in more detail here.)
The focussing question
In The One Thing, Keller offers a useful question, to help you focus on what is most important to you:
What’s the one thing I can do, such as by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
He suggests adapting this focussing question to whatever area of your life you want to improve.
- What’s the one thing I can do this month to attract new clients?
- What’s the one thing I can do this month to get more gigs?
- What’s the one thing I can do to make the morning school run less chaotic?
- What’s the one thing I can do daily to get fitter or healthier?
- What’s the one thing I can do to increase my income this quarter?
- What’s the one thing I can do to be more productive in the studio?
Choose something you can complete in a month
Be realistic. Look at your existing commitments first, then decide what else you have time for.
There’s no point scheduling a monumental task that will take days to complete if your diary is already full of meetings, your children are off school, or you already have several big deadlines looming.
If you’re trying to establish a new habit, make it as easy as possible, by starting so small it’s almost easier to do the thing than avoid it, then building up gradually.
If you can’t complete your focus task in the time you have that month, break it up into smaller tasks.
When my coach first asked me to choose a monthly focus, for example, I knew I needed to sort out my messy, dated website. It had been on my to-do list for months. It was the source of constant problems and frustrations that sapped my time, energy and focus.
So my first monthly focus task was to build a new website. When she asked me to be more specific, I came up with something like this: “Transfer current site to a new and better WordPress theme, check SEO on all posts and pages, create a new lead magnet, grow mailing list.”
Multi-tasking doesn’t work. You know this!
My coach gently pointed out that this was not one thing. It was many, many things. And as I tend to shut down completely when it comes to tech tasks, they wouldn’t get done.
Stubbornly, I insisted I was perfectly capable of multi-tasking. (There are, of course, countless scientific studies disproving this. They just don’t apply to me.)
You don’t need psychic powers to predict what happened next: I got overwhelmed, and did none of it.
You may well do that too at first. Don’t treat it as a failure, however, and give up on your one focus. You’re learning a new skill here. So be patient. You’ve collected some useful data, to help you create a more realistic goal next month.
Break it into manageable chunks
The following month, my one thing was this: choose a new website theme, a design template I could use with ease.
Even that felt overwhelming, so I divided it into smaller, more manageable tasks.
Week 1: Make a list of the features I need.
Week 2: Research WordPress themes. Ask friends and fellow coaches to recommend one that is easy and intuitive to use, and has my key features built in.
Week 3: Check out the top recommendations and play with the demo versions.
Week 4: Choose a theme and buy it.
This is what progress looks like
This didn’t feel like much. Each task took under two hours. But I actually did them, which gave me some momentum after months of being stuck and fire-fighting problems on my rickety website.
The following month, my focus was to find someone to migrate my old site to the new theme, then maintain it. I got recommendations, interviewed a few people, and chose one to put on a monthly retainer.
A few weeks later, I had a clean, contemporary-looking website that no longer took an age to load or looked like a radical remix of itself when viewed on a phone screen.
Even better, having someone who knows what they are doing to deal with the backend of my website freed up my time. And got rid of a lot of frustration and procrastination. Which meant I got even more done in the following months.
Getting things done is a gift that compounds
Especially when you choose the right things. Which is a skill in itself: you’ll get better at it, the more you practice it.
Of course, if you finish your one focus before the end of the month, you can move to the next thing on your list, if you want to. But you could also take some time off, to do something fun!
As more problems get solved, you get to focus on what’s really important: growing your business, bringing in the money you need, and focussing on the creative work that only you can do.
What do you think?