These days, with all the new technology, many are convinced that multi-tasking is the answer. Yet there is more and more evidence that jumping tasks on every alert for a new email, text, or Skype call actually decreases overall productivity. According to Rasmus Hougaard, the founder of the Potential Project , delivering mindfulness programs to Amex, Nike and Accenture, taking time for what matters, there are some basic rules that can help you manage your focus and awareness in work activities.
Practicing these will ensure greater productivity, less stress, more job satisfaction, and an improved overall sense of well-being. The guidance includes a singular focus for at least a few minutes on your current task, and limiting your distractions very strictly during this period. Hougaard outlines eight mental strategies or habits that every entrepreneur needs to cultivate, to keep your mind clearer and calmer, and increase your overall productivity.
I concur, based on my own experience in startup ventures and mentoring entrepreneurs. Examples of companies already coaching their teams on these mental strategies include Google, Starbucks, AOL, and more:.
Mentally be fully present and engaged in the current task Presence is foundational for focus and mindfulness, it means always paying full attention to the people around you, making a conscious decision to intentionally be more present.
Deliver rational responses rather than impulsive reactions This requires patience, or the ability to stay calm in the face of challenging situations. Patience is more concerned with larger goals, rather than temporary quick-fix solutions. Practice by stopping and taking a few breaths to calm down, before reacting.
Practice positivity in every interaction with people. Practice by overtly rejecting any habitual perceptions, and challenging yourself to be more curious in your day-to-day activities.
It will just make you less effective and less happy. Practice by choosing to move on, without carrying an inner battle. Balance your focus between instant gratification and discomfort work Consciously identify the tasks that come easy to you, versus tougher tasks, and also a balance between short-term and long-term, that inevitably have different levels of satisfaction once completed.
Practicing awareness of balance will lead to a change in your level of quick distraction and long-term avoidance. The key here is to anticipate at least some activities you enjoy daily. Many people find this in just sitting still for a few minutes in quiet contemplation, maybe reading or going for a walk. Whatever it is, just switch off and find some personal quiet time. Consciously let go of heavy thoughts and distractions Letting go is a simple but powerful mental strategy to clear your mind and refocus on the task at hand.
Let go of a problem stuck in your head means putting it to one side, focusing on another challenge and when you return, creating the opportunity to refocus your thoughts. We all face overload, increased pressure to move fast, and a highly distracted work reality. Our attention is continuously under siege, with more things and stuff to do causing distractions. His premise is that the aggregation of small gains across the board adds up. And he is right. The maths here is compelling, which is nice.
Look at where you can make a step-up, and create a focus on continuous improvement, not the end result. Brailsford did this with the Omnium team, were the World Record was 4.
His challenge was: how do we achieve a performance time of 3. And they did just that. Gamblers trust to luck, entrepreneurs trust in their own hard work. Periods of extraordinary effort borrow from the future, until it all catches up on you.
In his fine article regarding nominal and ordinal bivariate statistics, Buchanan provided several criteria for a good statistic, and concluded: The percentage is the most useful statistic ever invented. After that, you might read it over and edit the document and polish your prose. Each of those steps is time-consuming. Unfortunately, time is a limited resource, which creates an opportunity cost. Opportunity costs are the name economists give to the things you could have been doing with a resource you spent in another way.
The time you devote to a particular project could have been spent on countless other things on your to-do list, but you chose to spend them on that project. Every project you do at work needs to be effective, but not every project needs to be perfect. An email you send to a close colleague at your level of the organization can be a partial sentence with typos in it and it will still elicit the desired response without damaging the relationship.
A note to your boss might need to be written a little more carefully. A presentation to a potential new client had better be polished to a high gloss. That is, the key to success at work is solving what researchers John Payne, James Bettman, and Eric Johnson called the effort-accuracy tradeoff. You have lots of strategies you can use to complete a task at work. Some involve more work and time than others. The more effortful strategies generally lead to better results than the less effortful strategies.
To maximize your productivity, you need to learn which assignments you are given require your best effort, which require a decent effort, and which can be dashed off.
Of course, in order to master this effort-accuracy tradeoff, you have to focus some effort on how you resolve that tradeoff.
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