Be wary of falling prey to distractions…
They abort the birth of brilliant ideas
We live in an embarrassment of information.
We are connected to everything. It’s all here. A few keystrokes away.
And the only downside is the intoxication
of it.
Be
wary of falling prey to distractions
Because we can become drunk with options.
Games, blogs, chats, videos, social media, gossip updates; there is no end to
where we can go. Oh the places.
Two hours later we step back from the screen
wondering where the two hours went. Sure, we took a lot in, but what went out?
That’s why the warrior of time must keep
his sword sharp and at the ready.
To carve out and cut away the clutter. To
open up a clear space for creation. For it is active creation that will produce
wealth and well-being. Not information.
Even though we understand value of self-education,
we know intuitively that we must, sooner or later, provide service to others.
We must create something of value with our time.
Therefore, more than ever before, focus is
vital.
Uninterrupted time is the portal through
which we now succeed. Not the flurry of multitasking and chaos.
Devoted time.
It’s your war against interruption and
distraction.
Because if you can bring gentle, sustained
focuc to a task, you’ll never regret the results.
As my friend and colleague Dusan Djukich
says in his marvelous book, Straight Line Leadership, we stop. We start
something and then we stop. When Dusan coaches his clients his recommendation
is this: stop stopping. The more space we open up for ourselves the more
problems we solve. The faster we achieve our goals. The great philosopher
Voltaire observed, “No problem can withstand the assault of sustained
thinking.”
Devoted
time. It’s your war against interruption and distraction.
The key word in Voltaire’s observation is “sustained.”
We don’t sustain, we don’t take long, thoughtful, sustained walks. We don’t sit
quietly in space and solitude until a problem disappears [which it would]
because we are too busy.
Or, we think we are. Same thing.
We think we’re busy, especially today, with
the way our “phones” hook us up to the whole nagging planet. We are so
connected now! We never have to be alone again!
This is good?
In most ways, it is. It’s fun and exciting
when I sit in my Arizona office and get urgent text from a client in Scotland.
The phone beeps and I grab it and check it.
Have
you ever looked back on your life and wondered what would have happened if you
hadn’t stopped?
But what happens when I do that? I interrupt
my meditative train of thought and it might have been a train that was taking
me to a HUGE breakthrough solution to a major challenge. Beep, beep, beep! And
I stop. I am on to something beautiful if only I would continue, but I
stop.
Are you a good piano player? No? But you
took lessons, once, didn’t you? Yes? What happened?
“I stooped.”
Have you ever looked back on your life and
wondered what would have happened if you hadn’t stopped? Piano, a foreign
language, studying a certain subject, a distant love, anything.
Management and efficiency studies in the
work place tell us that one hour of uninterrupted time is worth three hours of
time that is constantly interrupted.
Or, as the old saying says, winners focus,
losers spray.
So the warrior element in how you relate to
time is how “violent” a swordsman you are going to be before your day begins.
How much uninterrupted time will you carve out for yourself? Will you be a true
time warrior?
Because if you will, you’ll love your
timeless time. You’ll be amazed at what you can create when time is not an
issue.
The self-employed warrior
When we’re newly out on our own, freshly
self-employed, only answering to ourselves, it’s usually a shock to the system.
Because when we worked for other people, we let them rule the day. We’d show up
and go where they wanted us to go. They would manage us, and then we would reluctantly
do good work inside that structure, but now that we are off on our own, the
challenge is different. Because we don’t know what to do. And creative people
need some kind of structure. That is, if they are going to have productive
days.
The self-employed warrior
When i write a book without schedule, it is
really a nightmare, and it doesn’t get done right, and i end up at the end of
the deadline working overtime. In the end, it’s not good work, and it’s not
creative writing.
Paradoxically, the best creative comes from
working with the most structure you can possibly impose on yourself.
Any thing you can do to schedule yourself
increases creative output. You think it would take away your spontaneity, but
it really doesn’t. It’s amazing how well an artificial structure works. Forcing
the action. It works in all aspects of life. I don’t feel like going to this
meeting … I don’t feel like going to this family gathering… I dread it. And
then I get there and I have the time of my life.
So now I just do it. Because it’s on this
structure I call a calendar.
What do I feel like doing right now? That is the worst question I could ever ask myself during my workday.
On a weekend that’s a fine question. “What
do I feel like doing? I’ll watch a little baseball I’ll play the guitar.”
That’s fine, but in my workday, the feeling questions are: “What do I want to
produce?” and “What structure would guarantee that?”
