How many ‘goals’ or ‘development points’ do you focus on at any one point in time? Do you choose one thing you are working on or towards, and leave that as you sole purpose? Or do you monitor all your targets, and apply each one as and when it is most appropriate?
I ask this as I am currently in state of considerable mayhem on the work front. Productivity Dark Arts can only save you so much time, and currently I have too much on my plate in the day job, and a whole load of things I am working on at home (don’t worry, I’m not about to realise an e-book on how you can make money from blogging to add to the pile…). In amongst this fog of chit, I am trying to use the volume of work as an opportunity to ‘fast track’ some things.
Fast track? Well, I believe goals and areas for development are reached and solved by developing new positive habits. Habits are formed by repeatedly doing something, by ‘grooving’ – a process much quicker when you are doing 100 things a day than when you are doing 10.
But I digress on to habits, and they are a whole other topic. What I am interested in is whilst I am slaving away, do I just try one thing all the time. For example, I am try some mindfulness – trying to enjoy and experience what I doing right now, rather than what I normally do which is look forward to finishing and starting something new. Do I focus on this all day and night?
Or do I throw some more things into the pot – working on seeing the detail in everything; making sure I keep searchable notes; only checking e-mail every couple of hours; etc. It would be a nightmare to try and do all these at the same time, but should I look at each task and say “this would be really good to think about the detail on”, or “while I do this, I’ll lock the e-mail away”.
I am leaning to the one area of focus. I don’t want to blunt the effect – end up a little bit better at everything, rather than a whole lot better at one.
What would you do? Have you any experience of this? Lets hear your stories in the comments.
