Focus

Ack! I totally missed posting this last week. All the more reason to keep “focus” in the forefront.

I have been so distracted and thrown off this week. My husband ended up needing to go in for four nights over the weekend. He’s usually an 8-4, M-F sort of guy, so my understanding of the passage of time got completely out of wack and suddenly it was Wednesday night and I wasn’t sure what happened to the last five days.

Focus is something I’ve been lacking lately. I think I already told you that my middle son received an official diagnosis of ADHD this past fall. Getting things figured out for him with all that has been quite the adventure. It’s also taught me a lot about myself and the fact that many members of my family, including myself. are most likely also ADD. One benefit of this is that I can get hyper focused and sit down to work on a creative endeavor for hours and hours at a time with out noticing that any time has passed. The downside is that if I am not 150% invested in a particular task I tend to end up getting distracted by ten other tasks and struggle to finish any of them. And with five kids, three cats, and a puppy there is no shortage of things to distract me from whatever my most important tasks are for the day. This past week in particular had a lot of “If you give a mouse a cookie” sort of days.

So the word I am concentrating on this week is “Focus”. My top task is to make sure I write a to-do list before I go to bed. My company is big on doing a “6 most important things” list. Brian Tracy recommends in “Eat That Frog” to make a list, then narrow it down remembering that only 20 percent of your list is stuff that actually needs to be done by you. But I think the approach I am going to take is a “Focus/Bonus” list. This is to break down my list into a few top things to focus on and then put everything else on the bonus list–stuff that is just a bonus to get done. I got this from the Overcoming Chaos podcast on Audible.

What does your to-do list look like? How do you make it work for you?

So here are some things to think about while you work on your focus.