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4 Things to be Aware of When Managing Your Time and Yourself

[From GTD Agendabits]

Even if you work from home and you are managing yourself,
having no boss looking over your shoulder making sure you
do the right things and get you on the right track, or if
you work in a company, there are 4 key things you want to be
aware of, and that you want to avoid. These will rob you
of efficiency and effectiveness.

1) Multi-tasking

Most people right now are so busy, trying to do so many
things at once, that they can’t focus on anything. Checking
our e-mail, checking our Blackberry, our voicemail, and
so many distractions. As it turns out, multi-tasking is
not very efficient, although many of these people say
"I’m a multitask-er and I work fine like this." Scientific
studies showed that multi-tasking actually lowers your IQ
and your ability to process, more than getting high.

So if you multi-task, you wan to stop that and learn to
focus on one thing at a time.

2) Distraction & Interruption

When we get distracted, it takes us something like 20
minutes to get back to the point we were at, right before
we were distracted or interrupted. Most of us go around
all day long going from one thing to the next, and at the
end of the day we are asking ourselves "Why didn’t I get
anything done?" It’s because we allowed ourselves to get
distracted, and we allowed ourselves to be interrupted.

You need to stop allowing yourself to get distracted and
be interrupted, and you need to stop distracting and
interrupting others.

3) Friction

Friction is an inefficiency that is caused by something
not working smoothly, or something not supporting you.
As an example, you sit down to start working, and you
have a family member that you had a fight with, and you
are upset about it. You’ve got emotional friction inside
of you. Or if you don’t have a comfortable work environment,
maybe it’s aloud and with people distracting you.

Where do you have friction in your life? Where do you
have friction around you? You want to start eliminating
these one by one, physical friction, emotional friction
and psychological.

4) The "Monkey Mind"

That’s the most difficult. It’s the process that happens
to most of us, when we have a thought, or we have a feeling
that is triggered inside of us, it sets this whirlwind, or
domino effect, of these others. If you have a thought that
comes up, and then your mind runs away and starts thinking
about a bunch of other things, it’s essentially the same
as if someone walked into your office, and started a
conversation with you, and caused you to stop doing what
you were doing. Your mind just ran away.

Bottom line, you’ve got to let go of the idea that
multitasking is efficicient, you’ve got to let go of
distraction, of having your cellphone on with the text
messages coming in, of having your e-mail browser open
all the time and checking your e-mail all the time.
You’ve got to come in and focus, build a supportive
environment that allows you to really zoom in and
narrowing on the thing you are working on, that doesn’t
have a lot of friction in it, and that doesn’t trigger
the monkey mind.

Originally posted on "Gtdagenda Bits [newsletter@gtdagenda.com]", Di 16.06.2009
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