3 Tips to Focus Your Life and Be a Dominant Force
One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn over the past year is how to slow down.
Or, let me re-phrase that, one of the hardest lessons I have had to learn over the past year is how to FOCUS. I used to think that meant slowing down, but it’s really not.
You see, toward the end of last year, I was busier than I had ever been. 40-plus client hours a week, several programming hours, attempting to run a blog, writing articles for publication, growing a business, working on my freestyle rapping, maintaining relationships…it was a lot. And it was great because I thought feeling beat to a pulp was how I was supposed to feel. I thought I was hardcore because I didn’t sleep. And for a while, I felt just fine.
But then I hit a wall.
As Bilbo Baggins says, “I was like butter, spread over too much bread.” I thought I was getting so much done, but when I stepped back to evaluate my body of work, it was less-than-stellar.
In fact, I wasn’t delivering what I knew I could deliver in anything. The insanity had caught up with me. I actually wrote a blog related to my insanity HERE
It’s safe to say, my views on recovery have changed. But that’s what happens when you read the blog of someone who is growing up in life. I evolve (just started shaving the other day). And I have no problem saying I was an idiot. I think when you write for the masses (or whoever reads this…hey Mom!) you need to own up to everything you have ever written.
Anyway, I knew I needed to make a change if I ever wanted to make serious progress toward my goals, and not just sputter around for years on end. It was a tough decision (akin to holding in a fart in public…”this one won’t smell, I know it!”), and it took months to come to fruition (stubbornness is a personality trait of mine), but it’s finally coming together.
And it feels good. I feel like I am actually back to killing it and the QUALITY of everything is close to 100% back to my standards. I know a lot of people deal with burn-out and being so busy they can’t breathe, so I thought I would share a few strategies that are working for me that maybe you can use in your own life to get more done, smartly, and be a dominant force.
#1: Define What You Really Want
I want it all. And still do. But you can’t have it all at the same time. It’s similar to training.
I love the enthusiasm of someone who comes in for their assessment and wants to bench 500 pounds, run a marathon in under 3 hours, dunk a basketball, get to 2% bodyfat, and tame Rihanna, but all of that cannot be accomplished concurrently. There are too many competing demands. You might make some progress with all of those, but it won’t be anything worth telling anyone about. There has to be a give-and-take.
Prioritize what goal you want the MOST, and focus your energy to that goal.
To give you an example, this past year I wanted to basically run 2 businesses, grow the site immensely, put on 20 pounds of muscle, and do a bunch of extracurriculars. However, I made the fatal mistake of not defining which one took priority over the other. So they all were approached in a similar fashion and as I mentioned above, I spread that butter thin and I ended up falling short of several goals.
What do you want, more than anything, right now?
That’s your number-one goal and that’s where you need to direct the majority of your time and resources.
It’s a simple truth, but it takes guts to put other things aside for a bit to accomplish that number-one goal. Going back to the training example, that’s why periodization exists. It’s not like you can’t ever have endurance if you also want strength. You just have to devote yourself to strength for a period, and then shift endurance to the forefront for a bit, while strength is being maintained, and so on.
You can pursue other goals, but you cannot expect to devote 100% to everything. That was a tough one for me to swallow.
#2: Understand that being busy and being productive are totally different
Is your to-do list filled up today?
With what? Seriously, with your number-one goal in mind, go through and pick out what to-dos are taking you closer to your goals. If you’re like I was, at least half of the items are just busy work…stuff that could be out-sourced or crossed out altogether.
When I took a look back at my planner recently, my jaw about hit the floor with the amount of time I was throwing away doing crap. Crap is defined as “anything you could look back on and wonder why you invested your time in that in the first place”. Found that in Webster’s.
Crap pretty much encompasses a lot of the “working in the business” tasks. The day-to-day stuff that could be made easier with an efficient system or with someone else’s expertise (see strategy #3). It’s like what the Pareto Principle states;
80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts
At the end of each day, ask yourself what actions were taken to move you closer to what you want most. Since this was clearly defined in the first step, those actions should present themselves clearly. If not, then you did too much busy work. If you don’t know how to reduce the busy work, see strategy #3.
#3: Get comfortable with automating and delegating
I don’t consider myself a control freak, but I took it as a point of pride that I did everything with the business. I am a workaholic, by nature, and as I mentioned above, I thought I was supposed to feel like the lone wolf tearing into the business world.
Well, I soon found out that being a lone wolf is a sure recipe for burnout and ultimate disaster.
You need help, even if you don’t run a business. Help doesn’t have to be a physical person, it could be a software system designed to streamline otherwise time-consuming tasks.
I was talking with one of my business mentors the other day and I was going on about this huge task I was doing all by myself. After I finished explaining, he said,
“Who are you going to hire to do that?”
I said, “Um, what?”
Mentor: “You’re going to do that all by yourself?”
He didn’t say it outright, but he didn’t have to. I understood the point. So I went out and hired my 1st employee to run a sector of the business and it is turning out to be an amazing decision, as now I can focus more of my time on what I love to do, which is train and write. My only regret is not doing it sooner.
Going back to the software systems, I spent a long time being very stubborn about using an iPad to do my client programming. I liked being old-school. What real coach doesn’t use paper and pencil?
Well, since making the decision to run everything off of Google Drive, the time spent going through papers, writing down notes by hand, printing those papers off, and organizing them, has been virtually eliminated. I can program from anywhere with minimal space and this alone makes me way more productive. I also am in the process of selling all of my books and getting everything through the Kindle app, so I don’t have to waste energy carrying around books and waiting for them to arrive in the mail. I was EXTREMELY stubborn about this, as I felt it was inhumane not to read from a physical book. But, I recognized there was a better way to do things, and if I didn’t do it, I was going to slow down the process of achieving my number-one goal.
Since I started reading on the iPad, I have finished nearly 500 pages of material in under a week and a half. My learning has been vastly accelerated, and therefore, so will my clients’ results, my reputation, and ultimately, my revenue.
Did I mention I also run payroll, client scheduling and billing, and basically my whole life off the iPad now? This is done through various apps, such as Intuit and Mindbody. If you don’t have a tablet, invest in one.
I understand that some of you reading are like, “Kasey, how are you just realizing the iPad can do all of this?” And I deserve that. I was a little behind on the whole thing, but the important point is that I am now doing it, and if you aren’t, you probably should, because I am sure it will help you streamline your life in some way and make you, wait for it, more of a dominant force.
Take advantage of the technology available to you! Don’t wait as long as I did to wisen up.
What can be automated in your life?
What can be delegated?
Take those questions seriously and come up with as many things as you can.
Conclusion
Don’t fear not doing everything always. Don’t worry about not having a full to-do list. Like any training program, it’s not about how things appear, it’s about the RESULTS!
Get focused and take action. Subtract what is not necessary to take you to your number-one, I want it so bad it hurts, goal. I know I am doing a lot better with the quality-over-quantity mindset and I know you will too.
Take the Leap,
Kasey, CSCS
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