Challenge Mono-uni-task! Defeating Distractions - When I Grow Up

Challenge Mono-uni-task! Defeating Distractions - When I Grow Up Comic by http://www.ashersarlin.com Today, Zen Habits was able to wrap up tightly everything Ive learned in my Challenge: Mono-uni-task! He wrote a post entitled 20 Strategies To Defeat the Urge To Do Useless Tasks. He writes: Procrastination is in all of us, and one of the best ways to procrastinate is to do all the busy-work that makes us feel like we’re doing stuff â€" while not doing the stuff we know we should be doing. Yes! Hello! That is exactly what I felt my issue was while trying to mono-uni-task, as I was always so tempted to click over to my Gmail, or see if something new was posted on my favorite blog, or check and see my friends Facebook status. My favorite suggestions from Leo include: 1. Know what’s important. If your task list is just a list of everything you need to do, you haven’t distinguished between the high-impact tasks and the busy-work. Mark down your top three priorities for the day. Everything else should be secondary. Ive done this by using one tab in my Travel Moleskine as my Daily Dos. In it, I write my 3 To Dos for every day of that week. Those MUST get done (and in an ideal world, they get done before everything else). I review them on the subway to work every day so they stay with me when I have some downtime. 3. Single-task. I wrote recently about the power of single-tasking, and that’s important here, because if you multi-task, you tend to switch between what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t â€" the important vs. the useless tasks. Leo must have been reading my Challenge: Mono-uni-task! 4. Identify your time-wasters. What are the things that you do most often? For some, it’s email, for others, it’s the phone, for others, it’s a certain website or three. If you aren’t sure, track it for a couple days. Know your time-wasters and you can beat them. When I stop and think, I know that blog reading is a big time waster for me. So instead of looking at every blog Ive bookmarked every morning, I should put some time aside 3 times a week to read it. Or, I can read Design Blogs one day, Wedding Blogs another day, etc. Id have so much more time! Leo also suggested to log your time, but that seems more of an extra distraction to me (although it might be more eye opening to some). 11. Know your key times. When do you have the most energy and get the most work done? Identify those times of the day and make them your “distraction-free” times. Only allow yourself to do the important tasks in those times. This is something I want to target for myself, but its harder than it looks. I know I almost always get a second wind around 8p, and mid-afternoons Im pretty good too. Its those damn mornings.. 16. Schedule them. Designate certain times of day to do your batch processing of email, phone calls, meetings, whatever. Then, when you’re not at the scheduled time for those things, you know you’re not supposed to be doing them. This is a great suggestion, especially when youre trying to get your time management under control. Then, even if you dont do something, you can give it another time block instead of letting it disappear. 20. Celebrate! If you were able to complete your goal for the day, be sure to bask in the glory of your victory. That good feeling of accomplishment will help motivate you to keep doing that â€" it’s a satisfaction that is rewarding in itself, but you need to put special focus on it at the end of each day. Do that, and you won’t want to fail at your goal the next day. You know how I feel about Celebrating! Moving forward, Im going to commit to removing the distractions (not keeping my email open all day, only looking at my blogs at lunch, etc) as well as doing my Top 3 To Dos first thing in the morning. Everything done after that is a bonus!