Do you ever feel like you are on a stationary bike – peddling furiously but never moving forwards?

By Zena Everett, executive coach,

I’m constantly hearing how busy people are: it’s a badge of honour. Their days are ‘back-to-back meetings’ that they attempt to fit their real work around. They send emails late at night.

They are well-meaning but ineffective because they over-promise and under-deliver. They do what’s screaming out in front of them (emails, interruptions, distractions) and allow no time to step back and THINK.

Sounds familiar? Here’s the first steps to get Focused Busy.

1 Put priority tasks into your calendar as well as meetings:

Our brains prioritise immediate satisfaction over long-term rewards. It’s called the Urgency Effect: we far prefer urgent smaller tasks with a deadline (admin) than more important tasks without an immediate time restraint.

We like the payoff of ticking things off a list so we get bogged down into what’s called ‘organisational drag’. That’s fake work that fills our time but adds little value - replying to pointless emails, sitting in rambling internal meetings, routine admin, social media conversations.  We spend hours on this stuff, but it doesn’t translate into fees or relationships.

We have a choice about what we pay attention to.

Write a priority list then ring-fence uninterrupted in your diary to do them. Switch off notifications and concentrate. You’ll get more done in an hour of ‘flow’ working like this than three hours of trying to multi-task.

The world can cope without you for 60 minutes.

Manage your digital distractions. Just having your phone near you has been proven to take up cognitive capacity.  Schedule in on-line time, so you are off it when you are trying to work.

2 Allocate time for the small stuff too:

Note that it is vital to schedule time to do the less important tasks otherwise they’ll niggle away at you. At 4 am in my case.

Psychologists have identified something called the Zeigarnik Effect – the tendency of the human mind to fixate on unfinished tasks.  Rather than feeling proud about the tasks we have completed, we stress about the small stuff we still have to do: emails in my case. The solution – we don’t need to complete the task itself in order to free up this preoccupation.

Instead we just need to make a plan to complete the task.  This allows us to maintain our attention on the less urgent but more important task in front of us now, and focus.

3 Block out time to figure out the first step:

Are you procrastinating over something important but daunting? Give yourself time to work out HOW to start big projects, rather than putting pressure on yourself to actually start them.

What support, resources, ideas, help do you need? Who has done something similar before? What’s the purpose? Where’s the quick wins?  What are you trying to achieve and what’s the easiest way to do that? Allocate time to work through these questions and make a plan.

Then start.

I hope that’s helpful.  Any work on re-focusing has to start by reminding yourself of your priorities.  Identify one a day and do it (most of us have given up on attempting to do three).

Anything else is a bonus.

You can read more from Zena at www.zenaeverett.com.

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash