If you’re not sure, look to the people who came before you. People instinctively know what matters most. The amazing thing is when people ask themselves the question, they are almost always accurate. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. Based on goals in any area of your life, ask yourself, “What’s the ONE Thing I could do, such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?” Then time block to make it happen. The best way we’ve found is what we refer to as the focusing question in our new book The ONE Thing. What are some of the best ways to prioritize work and stay focused? When you start thinking of your days this way, the burden of always having to be “on” goes away and you end up accomplishing more. When you time block your most important work and treat it like going to movies-you make a stand around avoiding distractions-amazing things happen. All this so you can have an uninterrupted experience. Because you’re really clear about that, you turn off your cell phone, you grab snacks in case you get hungry, and you probably even make a pit stop before you go in. You’re there for ONE Thing-to see the film. That’s when I avoid distractions at all costs. If you looked at my calendar, you’d see regular appointments with myself to do my most important work. Because if you let your mind and body take over and allow your positive habits to become normal parts of your day, you won’t have to work at it all the time.I time block. But the best part is that it isn’t a secret limited to billionaires or movie stars it’s something anyone can do! So, don’t stress yourself out and don’t think of building good habits as an insurmountable, stressful thing that only superheroes can do. The authors have discovered that this is the world’s most successful people stay at the top of their game. And once you’ve got that one under your belt, pick something else. For example, don’t just spend the rest of your life focusing on answering your messages you’ve already got that down! So, once that habit has become reflexive to you, pick something else you want to improve and work on that. And if you want to do that, the key is to switch up your habits by forming new ones. Just keep doing it until it’s become a habit.īut after those habit-forming three weeks are up, the authors posit that you should take your self-improvement game to the next level. And once you’ve done that, do it the next day! And the next day after that. For example, maybe that means you need to get up an hour or two earlier than usual and take a walk to a quiet park where you can sip your coffee and answer your messages in peace. You’d like to dedicate a solid hour of your day to going through your messages, but how do you find the time? How do you keep from getting distracted or interrupted? In this case, you would askyourself focusing questions to help yourself cut through the distractions and find what you need. Maybe you’d really like to make a habit of replying to all your messages every day and knowing you can breathe a sigh of relief. But if you can just get yourself in the swing of making good decisions, it will become reflexive before you know it! So, how do you do that in the first place? The authors believe that you should simply take it one step at a time and keep following the practices we’ve discussed in the previous chapter! For example, let’s say you’re like me and you get really anxious about all those unanswered messages. However, that’s not to say that it won’t be hard there’s no doubt about it - forming new habits is always tough at the beginning. I might neglect the project that needs to be completed in 48 hours while I’m answering messages that aren’t time-sensitive at all. So, if my priorities are off kilter and I tackle messages first, I might fall behind on more important things. But my messages might not be the most important or most time-sensitive thing I need to do. But that might not necessarily be the case! Going through every single message and crafting a personal reply to each one can take me hours I could easily waste a whole day just working through my inbox. This means that when I look back at my to-do list and prepare to start checking things off, “Answer messages” looks like it’s the most important thing for me to do. But because I get anxious looking at my ever-growing list ofnotifications - (there’s something especially stressful about those little red pop-ups telling me I have 59 un-opened messages) - I usually put, “Answer messages” at the top of my to-do list. It doesn’t matter if they’re important emails or texts from friends, all messages tend to pile up in my inbox and get ignored for days because I simply don’t have the time to go through them during a typical day. Thanks to my busy schedule, I often struggle to reply to messages.
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