Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Focus”

16 Aug 2008

Thrashing and Power of Focus: the simple truth

Power by dfu

Nothing has struck me more since I began my pursuit of self-development a few years ago, than the apparent power of focus.

Struck about ten years ago with a real curiosity about the qualities and benefits of mindfulness within Buddhism, it feels like part of the end game for a lot of self-development challenges includes the ability to master the power of focus to the best of your abilities.

With my ‘simple mind’ investigations that I am now undertaking, I am now struck by the double-challenge of that mastery:

1. To be able to focus is a challenge in itself. I always remember a quote where someone said that the secret of their success was their ability to concentrate single-mindedly on one matter with absolute focus (for something crazily short like 15 minutes (would love to get this correctly sourced…..)

Our Simple Minds: Mind Tricks

Sorry that I’m struggling to shake the simplicity theme that underpinned the Play/ Game posts earlier in the

Person at Desk by Sigurd Decroos

week. I feel this will be a recurring theme throughout my exploration of conscious vs. other-than-consciousness as it is at the heart of our self-management.

The whole idea about tricking or ‘blatantly’ nudging yourself into change is a strange one when you consider the supposed power of the intellectual conscious. Back to the ‘remembering to take something to work’ example that I have mentioned before and that David Allen uses so well: how could such an intelligent human animal really rely on leaving something by the front door in order to remember to take it into work the next day. Why is NLP and hypnotherapy so effective in enabling self-change when analysed, it is clearly so simple: all about beliefs and mental associations.

I was struck this morning how we can trick ourselves into working. How we can fool ourselves into addressing challenging tasks just by being a bit dumb about it.

Put simply: if we remove the conscious barriers or layers between identification of the need for the action, and the action itself, then it appears that we get more done with less resistance. I sometimes think that Forest Gump is an ideal role model for all busy people who want to achieve more in their lives.

The Revelation of Micro Task Planning and Thinking?

Life in Detail 2 by Nate Brelsford

I was struck today by the power of planning. Not planning of your life goals: the goal setting and vision lifeblood of success. No: micro planning of the very task that you’re just about to do.

I think we’re so used to what we know how to do; our routines and our learnt ways of doing things. We probably know how to do most things that we come upon in our average work day. We think we know the ‘best ways’ of doing most of the things that we do on a daily/ weekly and monthly basis.

It’s interesting that when ‘cost’ or ‘efficiency’ consultants go into businesses, the things that would need to change to optimise a process are so simple; and afterwards so obvious. The ‘way we do it’ in both personal and business life becomes so ingrained we often don’t even think to think. And we rarely challenge it.

Blockers feel like they arise in our ability to achieve new things or do new tasks because:

1. Confidence is sometimes an issue

2. We are unused to thinking (or stopping to think)

3. We are unused to intelligently planning on a practical basis

It feels like we are so built to be responsive [link to article] that we are destined to respond poorly to new situations because of this lack of micro-planning.

What do I mean by micro-planning? I’m thinking about:

· Taking a short period of time to brainstorm the elements of the task you need to do

· Thinking about a realistic sequence

· Resources

· Restraints

· Other people

· Timeframes

But most importantly, taking the time to think…