The single most important ingredient to a full life and successful business is the ability to focus. Can you concentrate your time, effort, energy, and thought exclusively on your business or any task? The ability to stay in the present moment and focus is the critical success factor in everything you do. Focusing on dreams, goals, and values helps you to be self-directed, self-managed, and self-motivated.

The great thing about modern life and living in an affluent society is we have so many choices. This can be a curse at times because we have too many options to wade through all day long. We are constantly prioritizing and deciding where we want our focus to be. This leads to decision overload and the risk of deferring choice to chance can waste valuable resources — especially time and money.

We squander our focus by getting lost in a sea of distraction. Author and speaker Daniel Goleman said that scanning the landscape and choosing what to focus on and what to leave in the background is one of our greatest gifts. We must decide where to focus our minds because technology and social media pull us in every direction. 

There are three primary barriers to focus that I want to help you overcome: clutter, noise, and poor planning. 

Clutter comes in many forms from overflowing emails and workspaces to racing thoughts in our heads. Not just a source of distraction, clutter breeds more distraction as you waste time struggling to find things. Take time to organize; go through your desk, office, e-mails, and your brain to weed out what you don’t need. Simplify your workspace. Write down things you’ve been thinking about in a journal; the cyclone of thoughts in your mind is decreasing your bandwidth to take on more important projects and clients.

Think you don’t have the time to get things in order? You cannot afford to waste any more time losing focus. Organize, prioritize, and limit the distractions in your immediate view.  

To stay focused, eliminate the noise. Believe me, you can close the door to your office and hang up a “Do Not Disturb” sign. I provide my clients with a door-hanger that reads “Q2 High Payoff Activities.” The goal is to spend time on activities that provide you with the greatest personal and professional return. Limit interruptions and you will be amazed and how much you will accomplish in a short time. 

Poor planning is the nemesis to focus. Block and lock your time! This means you need to designate time for each hour of your day to high-payoff activities and stick to your schedule. First, determine your goals and assign time blocks to the tasks necessary to achieve them. Then, don’t do anything else during those times except what is on your schedule. No matter how good we think we are at multi-tasking, we aren’t. The more we divide our attention, the less attention we give to each task exponentially and the less we accomplish. 

This process is simple, but just because it’s simple, does not mean it is easy. Download the Strategic Weekly Time Plan from Achievable.com to help with this. Take time to give these simple suggestions a try. You will be pleased with the outcome.