66: Plugging Leaks to Focus and Execute

It’s easy to get off track and lose focus. Here are some of the ways I have been attempting to sharpen my focus and execution.

Highlights

• Time Warrior: How to defeat procrastination, people-pleasing, self-doubt, over-commitment, broken promises and chaos by Steve Chandler
  • Creating vs. Managing
• Advanced Client Systems (ACS) program hosted by Steve Chandler
• The Prosperous Coach: Increase Income and Impact for You and Your Clients by Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin
• Three primary leaks I’m seeing steal my focus
  • Email
  • News
  • Social Media
• Where do you waste time across a day?
• Being conscious and intentional about the things I work on
• Choosing “now” or “not now”
  • Once an email is open it has to be dealt with
  • You don’t leave your physical mail opened in your mailbox
• The power of turning the email preview pane window off
  • Saves all kinds of distractions
  • Easier to delete junk
• Thunderbird for email
• Move tasks that are living in your inbox to your task management system
• Managing all my tasks in Trello
  • Subscribe to the board (to get notifications)
  • Set due dates on important cards– email comes and I don’t delete it until I’ve dealt with the card
• Setting up simple website blocking with entries to /etc/hosts
  • Inspired by Greg DeKoenigsberg in episode 54
• Using podcasts listening to get the news without the distractions
  • The Daily
  • Wall Street Journal
  • NPR hourly news summary
• Scaling back social media noise
  • Cleaning up my follower list on Twitter
  • Turning off notification for Facebook group postings (reduces email)
  • LinkedIn
    • I would love to see more personal stuff here and less boring corporate blog posts about the latest product release
• My archiving strategy and space saving with Dropbox
• De-cluttering computer files
  • Daisy Disk to find large files
• Be on the lookout for leaks in your own life

What can you do to plug the leaks and focus your time on things that matter?

Credits

• Hallon by Christian Bjoerklund
• Cold Funk by Kevin MacLeod
• Original photo source

All songs licensed under Creative Commons

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