Gibsonia Gazette

Are You Out Of Focus? July 31, 2009

Are you one of those people who cannot focus on one task because there are too many tasks that seem to require your attention?  Do you refer to yourself as a “multi-tasker”?  Have you learned how to prioritize?

Many executives seem to have a tendency to make everything a priority to the point where nothing gets done or, at least, nothing gets done well. Where is it written that we must learn to do many things at once?

How would you feel if you learned that your car was built with the same lack of focus on priorities that some of us use to do our jobs?  Scary thought, isn’t it?

Hall of Fame and Cy Young Award winning pitcher Steve Carlton knew about focus.  Carlton’s concentration was so intense that he sometimes didn’t even see the batter, he has said.  He focused on the catcher’s glove and the pitch that he was throwing, nothing else.

Did he have interruptions?  Of course he did.  Batters will step out of the batter’s box to “interrupt” the pitcher and opposing fans will try to create as much noise as possible.  Carlton was still able to maintain his focus.

This is not to say that Steve Carlton didn’t have some bad days.  After all, he’s human, too.  And so are you, so a day here and there where it’s difficult to focus is a management challenge.  It’s OK to give yourself some time to handle the “mindless” activities; the stuff you want to do but don’t have to do.  Just be sure to get back on task.

We live in an age where everyone thinks they need to do many things at once.  The dictionary defines multitasking as  “ a computer doing more than one function at a time.”  I have not found a definition of multitasking that refers to human beings.  And yet, our culture has adopted this hi-tech term to explain what is becoming normal human behavior.

A study published in the American Psychological Association Journal describes research done by two University of Michigan Psychologists along with one from the Federal Aviation Administration.  The researchers did four experiments with 108 young adult subjects, split among four groups, measuring speed of performance as a function of whether the successive tasks were familiar or unfamiliar, and whether the rules for accomplishing them were simple or complex.

The measurements revealed that the subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks in every instance.

Switching from one task to another requires time to disengage the brain from the current task and engage it with the new one.  Your way of thinking about each task changes along with the skills needed to perform the new task, thereby slowing down your ability to complete each task.

This process is both inefficient and counterproductive.  However, if you focus on the priorities one at a time until they are complete or, you’ve achieved the goal which you set for that task for that specific day, you’ll be more efficient.  As a result you’ll eliminate the stress that goes along with knowing that things aren’t getting done.

Try this to help you get started;

1. List your “priorities”

2. Schedule blocks of time to work on them, uninterrupted

3. Have a mind set that you can only do  one at a time

4. Eliminate the ones that if you couldn’t do you wouldn’t or , heaven forbid, can be delegated to others, and stick to it

5. Take the remaining list and go through step two again

6. Look at the remaining list and determine what should be the absolute last thing you need to do

7. Continue doing that until you’ve worked your way up to what is now your number 1 priority

8. Focus on working on Number 1 and when you’ve completed what you need to do on that priority start with number 2 and so on

9. Schedule time for interruptions to return phone calls and to deal with E-mail

10. Ignore your Emails or, better yet, turn the monitor off until your schedule calls for it

Once you get into the habit of doing things this way it will become a way of life.  So, your first priority is to focus on setting up your list of priorities!