Why Focus Is Your Competitive Advantage in Your Business
Pictures this, your phone is ringing, your smartphone is buzzing with notifications, someone is talking to you, you have unreplied emails in your inbox and your stomach is growling, does this sound familiar? Unfortunately in these modern times this is the typical reality, at any given time tens of little things are constantly pulling you away from the original thing you set out to do. And it’s very easy for you to lose your focus and attention.
Statistics have proven that when you multitask, you end up killing your productivity by up to 40%! They show that you end up wasting a minimum of 2 hours every day which can sum up to a full day of work each week. This shows you the importance of focus in your business or personal life.
What is focus?
Focus is simply having a central point of interest or activity. If you read that correctly, it means doing one thing at a time.
Why is Focus Important to Success?
Being focused means being mindful of what you’re doing at that time. It’s the antidote against unproductive behaviors. Here is how focus helps you become a better business person.
1. Discourages Mental Multitasking
When you have laser focus, you end up being more productive. Productivity is a product of absolute focus and the ability to recover quickly from distractions. Practicing mindfulness while working on a task or even an important discussion can help you stay focused.
2. You Get The Right Things Done
When you focus on one task at a time, you end up doing it right. One of the strategies to focus on requires early planning. When you plan your schedule the night before; highlight all the tasks you will need to do in order of priority and the ones with the highest impact on your business. This will keep you from getting lost in the weeds of other “urgent” yet unimportant tasks.
3. You Accomplish More With Less Time
One of the ways to improve your focus is to deliberately focus on one task at a time. You will find yourself less stressed, frustrated and instead, you will feel more productive. You will end up doing more because you will reduce the risk of repeating or correcting errors on a task. When you are deliberate about where your mind is focusing on, you become aware of those tiny destructive thoughts.
4. It Promotes Active Listening and Engagement
In any relationship in your life, active listening is like a superpower. But in your business especially, it helps you have a sense of focus and direction. Active listening is listening to understand, don’t confuse listening with “waiting to talk”. Keeping your focus will help you hear and understand what customers or clients are saying about your product or service, and this feedback is crucial to your growth.
5. It Helps Prevent Burnout
Why is it important for a business to have focus and direction? Because it drives towards peak performance, and this involves learning to avoid stress and burnout. If you try to get everything done all at once, you will burn out; however, if you learn to do a single task at a time with mini-breaks in between, you’ll keep energized and be able to retain your focus. You will have clarity and you will be able to give your best quality of work. Focus helps you become aware of your mental strain levels while they’re at a recoverable point, rather than get overwhelmed and let them reach damaging levels.
How To Improve Focus and Concentration
You can build a rock-solid single-tasking habit, here’s how.
a. Know What’s Important
Are you focused on important tasks or urgent tasks? There is a huge difference and it’s easy to get lost in between. Don’t focus on the urgent at the expense of the important because you might miss a huge opportunity for something that’s less important albeit urgent. This is where prioritizing comes to play.
Rank your tasks from the most pressing to the least based on factors such as time required as well as the impact of this task on your business. The tasks at the top of this list are the ones that you should give the most focus. This should apply even to your goals. Keep yourself accountable for getting them done and save the less important ones for either later or another day.
b. Avoid Multitasking
By now you know multitasking is a myth, if you ever thought you were multitasking, then now you know that all that was just quickly switching between tasks, it is called split focus and it leads to poor productivity, low-quality output and often you will have to re-do them. Don’t waste your life, do one thing at a time.
c. Get Rid of Distractions
This is one of the most effective ways on how to stay focused on a task. Keep any potential distractions at bay. How?
Turn off notifications
Use two computers, on for social another for work only, avoid the social during work
Use only one tab at a time if you have ever started something and not finished it to completion? Or do you constantly keep starting something, and before you know it, you’re on to the next thing, leaving what you started hanging with no sign of completion? 🤔
I have a confession to make, that was me!! 😁 I would get super excited about something, start it then put it down because life kept getting in the way. But I'll let you into a little secret...I discovered how to stop this vicious cycle from going nowhere. Let me tell you it's been a dream that keeps getting better.
If you want to know my secret to finishing things that you start then you've gotta listen to this.
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Work offline whenever possible
Schedule your email time
d. Create a Single Tasking Plan
Create a plan you can stick to, there is no formula here, create a plan and schedule that can be useful depending on the nature of your work. If your work has repeat activities, you can set each activity for a certain specific time. Here are tips;
Have a timer for each task
Create deadlines for tasks
Theme your days e.g. Tuesdays are Social Media Marketing etc.
e. Deal With Interruptions
Procrastinate on purpose
Keep a read later list
Set aside exploratory time for your “read later” and bright ideas time.
How To Stay On Track
You will have days that you’ll find yourself multitasking and falling behind, to help avoid that, take regular breaks throughout the day to catch up on your personal activities or to do those things you set aside. These strategies to focus on will indeed improve your productivity.
Go and prosper! Remember “What You Stay Focused on Will Grow”- Roy T. Bennet.
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