19 Oct Forget time management. Master this to meet all your productivity goals
via Fast Company by Sarah Goff-Dupont
Raise your hand if you no longer trust yourself to remember everything you need to do. Keep your hand up if you’re so entrenched in knee-jerk reaction mode that the moment a “quick little task” pops into your head, you drop whatever you’re doing and take care of it right away lest it slip through the cracks.
For the record, my own hand is very much raised. I’m so paranoid about forgetting the little things that I’ll interrupt a perfectly good deep-work state just to put granola on the grocery list. Or send a book to my daughter’s Kindle. Or some other inconsequential thing that was totally not worth ruining my flow for. (I’ve already done it three times today.)
It’s an easy trap to fall into. Our lives are brimming with distractions: pings from teammates, family, or roommates milling around the house; current events, and our ever-present anxiety about them; the internet meme du jour. Unless we make deliberate choices about what to focus on at any given moment, it’s virtually impossible to get anything meaningful done
Time management alone won’t solve the problem because no amount of calendar Tetris can alter the way your brain functions. The missing piece is a mental practice known as attention management—the art of consciously setting aside trivial matters and directing our focus to bigger, more important things.
Attention management isn’t about eliminating distractions, according to author and coach Maura Thomas. (Watch a two-minute summary from her TEDx talk here.) It’s a matter of being intentional about how you respond to them—specifically, giving the most attention to the most meaningful, high-impact tasks. For individuals, the tactics include ruthlessly scrutinizing your to-do list, setting up a focus-friendly work environment, and banishing all attempts at multitasking.
The implications for personal productivity and advancement are obvious. Rising to the next level in your field means tackling meaty problems and delivering results on time, neither of which are possible if your brain is ping-ponging all over the place.
But does it scale? Can attention management benefit teams? Can its principles be applied at the organization level? The answer to all of these questions is yes. For teams and companies, the approach is similar, but with a few tweaks to account for the group dynamics in play…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE
#happiness #happy #happier #success #productivity #timemanagement #attention #focus