How I recover my focus after tripping over a distraction
There was a reality check moment for me this week when I had to realize, again, that I need to focus on the priorities.
I have a whole setup of tools to manage my time and projects, but I still get excited, then distracted, by new ideas. On May 31st, I was listening to this episode, How to Make 30 Videos in 30 Days as a Busy Person, in preparation for June, when I had planned to try exactly that for my team’s YouTube channel. I thought I had a good justification for it—to learn Camtasia in more depth by testing a new feature in each video and to build a playlist of two-minute tutorials for colleagues that may help improve their work, and because I thought it would be fun.
There was no visible block of time on my calendar to pull this off, so I would have had to spend my own evenings and weekends. But if I did, then I might as well upload it to my own channel. But if I did, then I would not be able to clock in at least three hours of immersion + active study for Mandarin Chinese per day, which was supposed to be my singular personal focus this year and has already gone quite off track. On June 1st, past my intended bed time, I managed to throw together one script, record the narration and screencast, then scrap the whole project.
I suppose on the plus side, I am able to abandon my efforts just as quickly. It sucks, but one thing that has helped me so much since 2017 is that for every task list or project board, I create a shadow list called “Sunk Tasks” or a board called “Graveyard.” It has allowed me to hold onto things I once wanted to do but that I can’t or shouldn’t do. It’s like a digital museum of dead ideas, so I have 5 sections: sunk art projects, sunk admin tasks, sunk errands, sunk keeping in touch, sunk random, sunk writing list. What a relief to clear them from the main list! What a relief to not have to look at the red overdue dates!
Starting now
- Add a daily recurrence for three hours of Chinese to my Google Calendar
- Use a template from this page How to Say No: Templates to Help You Say No In Any Situation (shoutout to my friend Beets for linking me this) whenever I get an invite that conflicts with something that is already on my calendar
- Reduce the amount of time I spend on “Starting the Day” (67 hrs so far this year) and “Whatnot” (95 hrs) to a maximum of 60 mins per day. These are time tracking entries I use for random-but-necessary tasks, like reading and responding to emails and messages on Slack, organizing my tasks on Asana, looking at Outlook Calendar, pondering whether I should change its color code scheme, and other extreme misc. things that don’t have their own category.
Reflecting on what I do, "once a week." 