The Enemy Of Focus, And My Personal Productivity Routine…

To checkout the Facebook Live Replay…

One of the better mentors I’ve ever had (Daegan Smith) once shared with me an interesting quote, and something that I think a lot of you can get value out of.

The quote goes something along the lines of “The Enemy Of Focus Is Seeking The Goodwill Of Other Men”.

What it means in a nutshell, is that when you’re constantly putting other peoples agendas in front of yours, you’ll have little room to focus on what you should actually be doing and little room to focus on the tasks that will move your business forward most quickly.

Actually, to checkout Daegan breaking it down into even more detail, checkout this video here.

Its a fine line to tread though, as you always want to be helping others and always want to be providing value, but at the same time, if you’re always on call for helping whenever they want, what you’ll find, is that as you begin to become more and more successful, the task becomes increasingly more difficult as you have more and more people reaching out for your help on a daily basis.

In my own personal journey as an example, today I woke up today to 78 Facebook Notifications, 12 messages, and another handful of Skype messages.

Now, do I intend on helping these individuals with there issues?

Yes. 

Do I intend on giving them all personal one on one attention through out the entire day?

No. 

But before I get to exactly HOW I’ll help my people, first I’d like to share with you a simple productivity hack to use in your own business to ENSURE forward progress everyday. 

The first thing you want to do when you get up in the morning (before logging onto facebook, skype, twitter, or whatever other social app you may be using) is take 20-30 minutes and brainstorm all of the activities you need to accomplish in order to move forward in YOUR business as quickly as humanly possible.

These are NOT activities that have anything to do with replying to all of the Facebook messages that you’ll inevitably get, but instead are activities that will move YOUR business forward, and set you up to affect the masses (which you’ll never do if you’re always reacting to individuals requests).

Next, you want to rate the activities based on a “High Impact, Minimum Effort” scale. I learned this by using Mark Joyners “Simpleology” app, and it works wonders.

The general idea is that you’ll have certain activities that will require a TON of effort, without yielding any huge result, and certain activities that will yield a huge result, without too much extra effort.

Your goal by the time you finish your brainstorming should be to end up with 3-5 “High Impact, Minimum Effort” activities that you can execute upon during your work day which you know will push you forward as quickly as humanly possible.

Then, take it a step further, and organize your 3-5 activities that you’ve come up with again, by the “HIME” scale. Figure out what the activities are that you should get done FIRST (out of the 3-5), and which activities out of those will account for the largest result.

Then, once you have that list, you get to work. 

I also like to focus on completing the activities that require the highest level of production first. So maybe on your list you have 1. Write a 1,500 work blog post on XYZ topic, and 2. Brainstorm a new offer – I’d focus on banging out the blog post FIRST in the A.M when you have more energy, and then focus on the activity that takes less overall production in the evening.

From that moment on, (once you’ve got your 3-5 things you’re focusing on), you get to work and have complete tunnel vision on getting those tasks done.

This exercise ensures that you keep your business moving forward, and ensures that not only will you be helping people in a one on one fashion, but also doing whats in your power to affect the masses.

THEN, and only then (after I’ve completed my tasks), will I take the time to go through all of my social media messages. Usually at some point I’ve checked to see if there are any emergencies that need tending too, but I’ll usually never give basic questions any attention until AFTER I finish my 3-5 “HIME” tasks.

Then with my social media messages, I do one thing… I look for patterns in the questions. You’ll usually find that many of the people who are coming to you asking for help have the same problems. They’re usually the core hurdles that people need to overcome in there Marketing in order to break though, and are very easy to identify.

Then from there, I’ll make a list of all of the various problems that people are experiencing, and make note of which one is the most common. I’ll keep this list as a list of “ideas for future content”, and then I’ll tell the people on my social media channels, “Great question, let me actually make a blog post about this so I can get the answer to your question in as many peoples hands at once”.

Then over the next days, I create content around all of the problems my prospects are facing.

What this does is:

A. Answer the question to all of the people who asked.

B. Allow me to reach more people with the same amount of effort

C. Puts a system in place for whenever someone else asks me the same question (I just send them to my piece of content that I created).

What’s cool, is that when you do this, your prospects will love you even  more based on the fact that they feel like you’re creating a piece of content just for them, which will lead to them feeling more important and more cared for. They’ll continue to follow you whenever you create more content.

This routine not only allows you to focus on the high leverage activities in your business that will allow you to move your business forward as quickly as humanly possible, but it also allows you to answer all of your prospects question, WHILE putting a perpetual system in place to take care of similar questions that come up in the future.

Use it in your business in order to move forward as quickly as humanly possible, and you’ll find yourself getting more done in less time, thus having more of an impact.

Did you get value out of todays post, “The Enemy Of Focus, And My Personal Productivity Routine…? If so, don’t forget to comment and share!

To the top,

Misha Wilson

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