18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (11 page)

Anne Lamott describes this moment beautifully in her book
Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
. “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day.
We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’ ”

That’s great advice. It’s like paying down credit card debt. You may have a huge, intimidating amount to pay. But there’s only one way to responsibly handle it: week by week. Each week, put a little aside—more than the interest and more than you’re adding to the card—and eventually it will get paid off.

But our lives are more scattered and complex than a report on birds or credit card debt. So we need another level of organization, not to make sure that
everything
gets done but to make sure the
right
things get done.

That’s where a structured to-do list can be helpful. But it has to be simple—otherwise, creating your to-do list becomes one more thing on your to-do list. Thankfully, you’ve already got the structure.

You already know the five (or so) things your year is about. Well, those things need to be the foundation—the organizing map—for your day. Because, like paying down credit card debt, the way to make an impact on your areas of focus for the year is by spending your time focusing on those areas. Every day.

So when you create your to-do list, do it in the categories of your five things. Then add a sixth category,
titled
The Other 5%
. Mine, for a particular day, looks like this:

This structure helps me carve up my overwhelm into manageable, digestible chunks. And it ensures I’m spending my time where I should. Because saying I want to focus on something is meaningless unless I actually spend my time there. And my to-do list is my plan for where I’m going to spend my time.

But this structure offers more than simplicity and focus and a way to get started. It also offers information about how I’m treating each area of focus, how they stack up relative to one another, and the kinds of things I’m doing to move forward in them.

If you look above, you’ll see that, for this particular day, my
Do Great Work with Current Clients
activities far outweigh my
Attract Future Clients
activities. That’s fine for a particular day. But if I notice that it’s a trend—that for the entire month my current-client work is full and my future-client work is empty—then I know I need to begin to generate activity in that area if I want to move forward and grow my business.

This is particularly useful when trying to decide between two competing demands on your time. If I’m trying to decide between two meetings—both important—I can look at the trend of where I’m spending my time and make the choice based on which area of focus has been lagging. It helps me stay balanced.

On the other hand, my
Have Fun and Take Care of Myself
list also has only one thing in it. But I might decide that it’s fine. That between my writing and my family and
my friends (all of which give me tremendous energy), I’m getting what I need to take care of myself.

I might also notice that
The Other 5%
is always full, very administratively focused, and taking more than 5 percent of my time. That might be an indication that I should hire an admin person or delay some of those things until I have more time in my schedule.

Fiorella and I worked through her list, putting each to-do item in its category. We realized that many things didn’t fit in any of her areas of focus. Which was part of her problem. She was spending time worrying about things that weren’t going to get her where she wanted to go, so we culled those. After a few minutes, she had an organized view of what she needed to do and how it was going to move her forward. The fog of overwhelm had dissipated.

She was still frighteningly busy. She still had a tremendous amount to do. But she was no longer frozen. Because she was choosing from six jams, not twenty-four, and was ten times more likely to choose one and start working.

I
was late for my meeting with the CEO of a technology company and I was emailing him from my iPhone as I walked onto the elevator in his company’s office building. I stayed focused on the screen as I rode to the sixth floor. I was still typing with my thumbs when the elevator doors opened and I walked out without looking up, not realizing I had gotten off on the fourth floor instead of the sixth. Then I heard a voice behind me: “Wrong floor.” I looked back at the man who was holding the door open for me to get back in; it was the CEO, a big smile on his face. He had been in the elevator with me the whole time. “Busted,” he said.

The world is moving fast and it’s only getting faster. So much technology. So much information. So much to understand, to think about, to react to.

So we try to speed up to match the pace of the action around us. We stay up until 3
AM
trying to answer all our emails. We tweet, we Facebook, and we link in. We scan
news websites wanting to make sure we stay up to date on the latest updates. And we salivate each time we hear the beep or vibration of a new text message.

But that’s a mistake. The speed with which information hurtles toward us is unavoidable. And it’s getting worse. So trying to catch it all is counterproductive.

The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate. Otherwise we’ll get tossed around like so many particles of sand, scattered to oblivion. Never before has it been so important to be grounded and intentional and to know what’s important.

Never before has it been so important to say “no.” No, I’m not going to read that article. No, I’m not going to read that email. No, I’m not going to take that phone call. No, I’m not going to sit through that meeting.

It’s hard to do because maybe, just maybe, that next piece of information will be the key to our success. But our success actually hinges on the opposite: on our willingness to risk missing some information. Because trying to focus on it all is a risk in itself. We’ll exhaust ourselves. We’ll get confused, nervous, and irritable. And we’ll miss the CEO standing next to us in the elevator.

A study of car accidents by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute put cameras in cars to see what happens right before an accident. They found that in 80 percent of crashes, the drivers were distracted during the three seconds preceding the incident. In other words, they lost focus—made a call, changed the station on the radio, took a bite of a sandwich, checked a text—and didn’t notice that
something changed in the world around them. Then they crashed.

And since, in our daily lives, the world around us is constantly changing, we’ll almost certainly crash unless we stay focused on the road ahead and resist the distractions that, while tempting, are, well, distracting.

Now is a good time to pause, prioritize, and focus. In the last chapter, “Bird by Bird,” we looked at how to structure your to-do list using your five (or so) big things to focus on for the year. That list will help you focus on the road ahead. It will keep your attention on what you are trying to achieve, what makes you happy, what’s important to you. That’s the list to design your time around.

But we’re not done with lists. There’s another list that’s useful to create: your ignore list.

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask a few more—equally important but often avoided—complementary questions: What are you willing
not
to achieve? What
doesn’t
make you happy? What’s
not
important to you? What gets in the way?

Some people already have the first list—a to-do list—though there’s usually too much on it. Very few have the second—the ignore list. But given how easily we get distracted and how many distractions we have these days, the second is more important than ever. The people who will continue to thrive in the future know the answers to these questions, and each time there’s a demand on their attention, they ask whether it will further their focus or dilute it.

Which means you shouldn’t create these lists once and then put them in a drawer. These two lists are your map for each day. Review them each morning, along with your calendar, and ask: What’s the plan for today? Where will I spend my time? How will it further my focus? How might I get distracted? Then find the courage to follow through, make choices, and maybe disappoint a few people.

After the CEO busted me in the elevator, he told me about the meeting he had just come from. It was a gathering of all the finalists, of which he was one, for the title of Entrepreneur of the Year. This was an important meeting for him—as it was for everyone who aspired to the title (the judges were all in attendance)—and before he entered, he had made two explicit decisions: (1) to focus on the meeting itself; and (2) not to check his BlackBerry.

What amazed him was that he was
the only one
not glued to a mobile device. Were all the other CEOs not interested in the title? Were their businesses so dependent on them that they couldn’t be away for one hour? Is either of those messages a smart thing to communicate to the judges?

There was only one thing that was most important in that hour and there was only one CEO whose behavior reflected that importance, who knew where to focus and what to ignore. Whether or not he wins the title, he’s already winning the game.

W
hen Eleanor was a little girl, maybe nine or ten years old, she needed new shoes. So she told her mother, and they agreed to go shoe shopping the following Saturday morning. But when Saturday rolled around, Eleanor’s mother got too busy and realized she wasn’t going to be able to fit in the shoe-shopping trip. So she told Eleanor they’d have to do it later.

“When?” Eleanor asked.

“Sometime this weekend,” her mom responded.

“When this weekend?” Eleanor asked.

“Tomorrow,” her mom replied.

“When tomorrow?” Eleanor persisted.

“Two in the afternoon,” her mom answered.

Eleanor relaxed and smiled. “Sounds great! Thanks, Mom.”

And sure enough, at 2
PM
the following day, Eleanor and her mom went to buy new shoes. Which, chances are,
would not have happened had Eleanor not insisted on knowing exactly when they were going to go.

Eleanor has always been wise, and this is an early example. She intuitively knew what determines the difference between intending to do something and actually doing it. Eleanor understood the secret to getting stuff done.

She reminded me of this a few nights ago when she asked me how my day went and I responded that it went well but many things I’d hoped to do didn’t get done. She remarked that I felt that way every night. That I never got to the end of a day and felt like I’d accomplished everything I’d set out to. That, perhaps, what I hoped to get done in a day was unrealistic.

She’s right, of course. For many of us, our to-do list has become more of a guilt list. An inventory of everything we want to do, plan to do, think we should do, but never get to. More like an I’m-never-going-to-get-to-it list.

And the longer the list, the less likely we’ll get to it and the more stressed we’ll become.

We can find the solution to this nightmare in Eleanor’s childhood shoe-shopping trip. In the final question that satisfied her: “When tomorrow?”

It’s what I call the power of when and where.

In their book
The Power of Full Engagement
, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe a study in which a group of women agreed to do a breast self-exam. One group was told simply to do it sometime in the next thirty days. The other group was asked to decide when and where in the next thirty days they were going to do it. Only 53 percent
of the first group did the breast self-exam. But all of the women who said
when and where
they were going to do it—100 percent—completed the exam.

In another study, two groups of drug addicts in withdrawal (can you find a more stressed-out population?) agreed to write an essay. One group was tasked to write the essay sometime before 5
PM
on a certain day. The other group also had to write the essay before 5
PM
on a certain day but were asked to first decide when and where on that day they would do it. None of the first group wrote the essay. Not surprising. What is surprising is that 80 percent of those who said
when and where
they would write the essay completed it.