What STANDS between
YOU and SUCCESS
Distractions seem to come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Most, however, fall into these five categories. Control these distractions and you'll see real progress toward the success you want.
e are born with the makings of success. The desire and ability to focus the whole of our being on something is basic human impulse that is at the heart of all success. Remember what it was like to focus heart and soul on what you were doing? That's the state of mind you must recapture if you want to be a big success in the adult world.
Few people attain real success because over the years most fall victim to distractions that rob them of the strength and purity needed to focus 100% on what they're doing. To get on the success track, we must relearn how to focus. We must develop the ability to spot distractions and build the strength to banish them from our minds.
Distraction 1
We Americans depend too much on coffee to stimulate our metabolism each morning. Problem is, the nervous energy coffee produces lowers your metabolic efficiency and accelerates the onset of nervous fatigue. By mid-afternoon you're too strung out to concentrate.
Daily physical exercise is the only way to keep your mental energy level high throughout the day. Exercise tunes your metabolism to function at a high enough level of efficiency to supply your brain with optimal flow of energy-packed, well-oxygenated blood. When you're out of shape, the blood flow to your brain provides only a fraction of the sugar and oxygen. You find yourself getting distracted after only two or three hours of intense mental activity. A half hour of exercise each day gives you two, three or four more hours of peak mental efficiency each day. That can double or even treble your productivity and turn you into an entirely different person in both outlook and the capacity for work.
The kinds of exercise that works best are those that can be performed daily come hail or high water and that can be sustained without interruption at a pleasant level of exertion for at least 30 minutes. Sports like tennis and racquetball are prone to scheduling conflicts and can rarely be maintained on a regular basis for more than a few weeks. What's more, unless both you and your partner are expert players who play without breaks, they don't provide the sustained cardiovascular workout needed to raise your metabolic efficiency. Also, if you're the competitive type, you can overtax or even injure yourself, thereby lowering your energy level and cutting into productivity.
The best workouts are solitary endurance sports like jogging, swimming and cycling that can be done any time. The best times are mornings, before your workday starts. Evening sessions are far more likely to fall victim to the demands of social or business entertainment.
Distraction 2
Long juicy phone chats with friends and enemies are deadly. If you need a ten minute chat every hour to get through your workday, you should feel lucky you even have a job. A phone chat costs you not only the time it takes to dial and talk, but also the time and energy to restore your focus to the effort at hand, not to mention the lost momentum caused by the interruption.
Coffee or snack breaks rob precious minutes from prime work hours while adding flab and lowering energy levels. Grabbing coffee and a donut seems like it should take a minute or two. In fact, a donut break is more likely to cost 20-30 minutes, especially when you consider the time it takes to refocus on what you were doing. If you must nibble, bring a snack to work and keep it on your desk so you can munch without breaking stride. Just make sure it's energy boosters like baby carrots or trail mix, not slothmakers like donuts, cookies or breads. Anything starchy makes you drowsy and costs you the keen edge you need for focus.
Bad habits can turn a highly effective person into a hopeless bumbler.
The trick to dealing with bad habits is to substitute a good habit in their place. Substitute a morning run or swim in place of TV or the morning paper. Substitute a call to a few key clients or associate in place of a chat with friends or a coffee break. Use the impulse to indulge a bad habit as the stimulus that triggers a good habit. The next time you feel the urge to get your third cup of coffee, consciously replace it with the desire to make a business call to a favorite client, or at least reach for a carrot or glass of water. The next time you feel the urge to call your significant other to engage in a long gripe session about your lazy, stupid, ugly boss, condition yourself to call your boss instead and suggest ways to add to the bottom line. That way you're actually using the conditioned power of your bad habits to trigger a good habit. If Pavlov could do stimulus-response conditioning with canines, you can train yourself to do the same.
Obviously, relaxation and entertainment must have a place in your life. The key is to save them for the end of the workday, after hours or weekends when they help us unwind rather than indulging in them early in the day and causing our workdays to start stillborn.