There is a lot that we want to accomplish. Aims that will take us a while to come to fruition and that require us to stay the course. Building and staying in good health. Having a great marriage. Building a family. Creating. Forming connections.
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Now that we are embedding our systems, it’s time to also think about how do we best go about making real progress towards the things that we have decided are important to us.
Small, focused work each day and week helps us to keep discipline, make meaningful progress, and manage all of the various tings we want to do.
Over the long term, the time you spend with this small focused work will outnumber any power sessions that you try and get through. Smaller progress each time will get us there time and time again.
Writing for 30 minutes each weekday (thank the the systems we build) will do more to enable us to publish articles and stories over a year then organising power sessions when we think that we have an idea.
We get 10 hours of writing in a month this way. 120 hours a year. That’s a lot of thoughts, articles, ideas that we can publish. That’s a short story for our character for complete some quests and level up. We will accomplish far more than trying to write for eight hours a day for a week when we have a lot of other obligations that we are trying to juggle.
We know that this is intuitively true for the gym. Total volume over the week matters. We can more easily get this through shorter sessions over the week rather than finding the energy and time to spend six hours ion the gym on day. That’s a lot we have to accomplish and not fatigue ourselves out.
Concentration and aim
Small focused work helps with our concentration and aim. Starting out, it can be hard to focus if we are used to having a distracted lifestyle. Let’s start small to gain experience and level up:
- Turn off notifications
- Keep our phone on silent or put it in a different room
- Tell ourselves that messages from others can wait
- Work in a different setting or environment to keep it fresh and avoid falling into an unhealthy routine – we might benefit from moving into a quiet meeting room, or going to a cafe, or siting in a different room in the house
- Only open on your screen what is relevant to your task
- Schedule the task into your calendar. Label it as a ‘focus’ category. When it gets to that time – work solely on that task
More can be accomplished in these short bursts of focused time rather than hours of trying to multi task and do it all.
Find your flow state.
We have to remember that the cost of being distracted is high. It takes 10 minutes to rebuild your train of thought once you have been distracted. We need to avoid this as much as we can.
Boundaries help here. Even though I know this, I do struggle and is a work in progress for myself. I allow myself to get distracted more than I should.
Review systems and your calendar
We need to continue to refine our systems. Check your calendar each week in advance to make sure it has your important items. For tips – check out podcast episode 005. Consistency is always the key here. Do you have time scheduled for what’s important – health, family, connections? Do you have time to write or read (if that is important) or to game (if that’s important) or to do some crafts. When are you seeing your family? What are you doing with your community? When are you going to the gym or for a climb or to a class or on a hike?
Know your values and what’s important
We need to remain focused on what’s important. This small, focused work needs to align so we are spending our time wisely. There is no point in building a system to write for 30 minutes a day if that is not something that resonates with you. Use that time to focus on crafts or painting and building out your skillet. Whenever we are doing something repeatedly, we should pause and examine if this task is taking us to where we want to go. If we overindulge each day or aren’t focusing on what we need to be focusing on, we won’t end up where we want to be in the future and will be sailed off course.
Focused time is good for building our character
System’s aren’t just for training, running, lifting weights, weight well.
We should also build our character through our systems and discipline.
Discipline builds confident – you can do things
Let’s build our character of focusing on family by being present in their conversations. This is small, focused work – holding your attention and being engaged. Reach out to your connections and stay in touch. Building these character traits each day helps us to become the people we want to become.
In summary:
- Small, focused work each day and week helps us to keep discipline, make meaningful progress, and manage all of the various tings we want to do
- This will move us further towards our port/North Star/goal then bigger intense sessions
- We need to develop our concentration and have an aim
- Review our systems and calendar
- Know our values and what’s important to us
- We also need to build our character through these processes too
Would love do hear some of the things you work on each day. Comment below or send me a message.
Until next time, let’s take action and move forward.