Hey! Do I have your attention?
I ask because as a society we have become more and more attention deficit. Our over scheduled, stimulated and overwhelmed culture is conditioning us to become more and more A.D.D. We are actually creating a phenomena called A.A.D.D. which is "Acquired Attention Deficit Disorder". This is caused by our multi-tasking and allowing ourselves to be in constant digital distraction. These activities are literally rewiring our brain and creating a condition that some of us need to take medication to alleviate it.
As entrepreneurs and driven sales individuals we are especially susceptible to this and become victims of our own ambition and enthusiasm to try to get it all done to be a success in real estate. If you are like me, I honestly find myself thriving on being busy to my own determinate and like I want to feel highly in demand and highly productive but it is really just me being busy, being busy. I run out of time to do the actual difficult or scary work otherwise known as my vital work that is needed to push my results and goals in business and life.
So here is this week’s challenge... Finding your five.
Hone in on the 5 things that are crushing your creative capacity and robbing you of precious time you should be allocating towards your greater goals and potential. There are probably at least five things you have done over the past three days you probably shouldn’t have... stop right now and jot those 5 things down.
- I find myself getting caught up in too much visiting in the office. Hard to control when is time and when is not the time.
- Going for unproductive coffee meetings with my peers and just having coffee and not with one of my clients and deepening relationships.
- Going for lunch and taking an extended lunch with office peers or eating by myself instead of a working lunch sometimes or having lunch with a client.
- Constantly having a tough time not responding and reacting to my emails at work and not designated small blocks of time a day to respond or use an auto responder during working hours.
- Getting sucked into social media and constantly checking in case I miss something on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and not really being productive.
Now find (at least!) five recurring tasks that are causing you to be busy at the sacrifice of being productive and jot those down as well. Find your five things you will vow to stop doing and either delegate or delete them permanently from your task list. Make this an ongoing challenge for you:
To prune your calendar more and more of the tasks, obligations and commitments you should not be allocating your precious time and creative ability toward.
My top 5 are:
- Saying "yes" too much. Need to learn to say "no" more and limiting my schedule.
- Too often putting others before myself and being the people pleaser.
- Feeling guilty about not having all my time scheduled to being busy and not finding windows of time to just sit and "be" and take time to just think.
- Not tracking and measuring throughout my day and how I spend my time daily if the tasks are important or unimportant? Are the tasks urgent or not urgent?
- Staying focused and on task and being constantly distracted by something or someone really causes me to not get stuff done and important business just keeps piling up.
My un-fab 5!
- Small, short, specific times in the day for checking my emails and social media.
- Being in the moment and being present with the people I am with at the time.
- Putting my spouse and children first
- Working on my faith and spirituality
- Working on my exercise and eating right
So what 5 things are you going to delete or delegate from your list and/or your calendar for this week? Declare a few of them in the comments below!
Strength and courage,
Wade
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