#372 Single-Mindedly One Touching

Here’s another Big Idea from Brian Tracy that you’ll find echoed among all the great productivity gurus.

I love how Brian puts it so here we go: “Once you have thought through your work and decided on your most valuable task, you must discipline yourself to start it immediately and stay with it until it is complete. When you concentrate single-mindedly on a single task, without diversion or distraction, you get it done far faster than if you start and stop and then come back to the task and pick it up again. You can reduce the amount of time you spend on a major task by as much as 80 percent simply by refusing to do anything else until that task is complete.”

That’s a really simple, really Big Idea.

Step 1. What’s important now?

(Sounds obvious but take a moment and decide: What’s THE most important thing you need to be doing right now? Might be x, y, or z work thing or it might be shutting down completely and spending time with your family. Whatever it is, know it. And, do it! Everything else is a distraction.)

Step 2. Eliminate ALL distractions and get to work. (Phone’s in airplane mode out of sight, out of touch, etc. All other distractions begone!)

Step 3. Start.

Step 4. Focus single-mindedly.

Step 5. Finish.

Enter: You as a Deep Working creative beast.

Repeat.

And, as per Peter Drucker, see if you can create large “quantums of time” during which you can chew on REALLY important stuff. (Recall Drucker’s three rules of time management: Track your time, manage your time and create jumbo big blocks of time — not just 90-minute chunks here and there but “half-days” and TWO WEEKS of uninterrupted time.)

So…

Today’s +1. Decide what’s important. Eliminate distractions. Start. Focus. Finish. Repeat.

And then: Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

All day. Every day.

btw: There’s another word for this. It’s called mindfulness. 🤓