As we enter a period of renewal and change, Your Clear Next Step is committed to helping our customers make their businesses and workdays even better. We will be here to walk beside you, to listen, to connect, and to aid in your search for clarity. In doing so, we are offering a free, daily Zoom call, called Daily Connections, at 1:15pm (CDT) every weekday from 3/19/2020-5/1/2020.
These calls are a chance for us to share tips and discussion about relevant topics (working remotely, maintaining consistency in uncertain times, building relationships across geography, staying motivated, staying connected, etc) and network with each other to provide help and support during this time of change.
Thank you to everyone who was able to join us today! The next call will be Tuesday, April 14th at 1:15pm (CDT). Click here to join.
On today's call...
Sinikka shared a few tips about finding focus.
We might be having trouble getting focused these days, so let’s take a look at some tips. Some of these are from our Get More Done Now curriculum.
1 – Figure out why you’re not sure where to focus next. The different reasons have different effects. Be sure to solve the right problem. Here are some examples, each of which has its own solution possibilities.
- I’m not sure what is most important for my role/boss/organization
- Moment is distracting
- Environment is distracting
- I lack the skills or training or tools
- I don’t want to
2 – Tackle the right problem.
- Ask the question, find the priority list, make a list and get it approved
- Give yourself some grace, take a deep breath, get a grip
- Find a better environment
- Get the tools or the skills or the training or ask if that’s really your task
- Get to the bottom of that
3 – Put a structure in place so this doesn’t happen again.
- Create a daily schedule
- Get some balance
- Establish boundaries
- Find a “pulse check” you can do
- Only you can do this one
Here were some ideas and questions shared by the group:
- I struggle with feeling like I have a lack of priorities and a lack of skill as I'm balancing my own tasks and new tasks handed off to me by a coworker who’s leaving, as well as some technology that doesn’t work super well at home.
- Instead of churning on a task, or on technology that doesn’t work, try to harness your intent to focus on a project you can work on.
- There are all kinds of struggles when all the old structure we used to rely on are so unstable and I don't have habits around our new structure yet.
- I have used my paper planner more than I ever have in the last month. I think being able to capture all the to dos in one place (especially when task A is reliant on task B which is reliant on task C) has been super helpful.
- I did some research and found out that, generally, somewhere between 25-30% of our time is spend trying to figure out what to do next. We could greatly reduce that time by planning before we can produce. But from a stress perspective, it’s a lot less stressful to plan out 6 tasks and then do them, than it is to do 4 un-planned tasks.
- I’ve been writing out what I want to accomplish each day, and I've also been adding an estimate of how much time I think the tasks will take. I can then step back and think about whether or not it’s realistic to think I can actually accomplish what I want to accomplish.
- My to do list is on my phone, and when I cross something off, the item disappears which can make it hard to remember what I'm actually accomplishing, so I'm now also keeping a to-done list and a to-do list.
- There really is science between the sense of accomplishment that you get from simply making your bed in the morning.
