Improve your Focus

Focus is what you put your time and energy into. We all focus on various elements throughout the day, weeks and year. These elements are our work, our household, our relationships. By being aware of our goals, desires and  commitments we can be more able to utilize our focusing ability. Focus requires accountability to ourselves or others. Sometimes it takes pure determination. One needs to be conscious of one's actions to be successfully focused. Here are three aspects of focus we may need to understand.


Health and Focus

It is important to consider our physical and mental health. When we are tired, sick depressed or exhausted, all our efforts towards focusing will be hindered. It is really important to improve our physical and mental state of health to increase our focusing ability.Good nutrition and exercise are key elements to successful and productive focusing efforts.


The Connection between Energy level and Focus Productivity

When are you most able to focus? Get to know your energy levels throughout the day.We can improve our productivity by utilizing our most energetic times on the most complex projects we want to complete. We can do routine and less complicated tasks during our low energy times. 



Get to know the Enemies of your Focus

What are your distraction? Electronic distractors such as computer games such as solitaire, excessive internet browsing, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader may swallow your day away. Lengthy phone calls, texting and an overloaded email box may also take up lots of your valuable focus time. Non-electronic distractors such as magazines, good books, long lunch or coffee breaks, or excessive amounts of any task such as cleaning, talking, or eating may also take up our best focusing time.  Be aware and start to work on reducing your distractions. You will then have more time to focus on what you really want to do. The distractors are forms of procrastination or avoidance. You might want to consider working with a productivity or life coach to help you move forward in the new year.  

We can improve our focus levels by working on these three elements.Real focus is a conscious commitment to ourselves.Now is a good time to review your areas of focus and work towards a productive 2012.

Look at What is Working in Your Life

When we are in the midst of change, we often think of the future as being the only place we want to be. Try instead to look at the simple things that are working in your life right now. There are almost certainly things that are going well and making your life comfortable and enjoyable. Sometime we have to dig a bit but it is worth taking a look.

Here are some elements we might want to think about:

• The current season
• The daily weather
• A good book to read
• Water that comes from a faucet
• A good friend to call
• A hot meal
• Lights that turn on at a flip of a switch
• A place to sleep
• A toothbrush to clean your teeth
• The sounds of early morning birds in your neighborhood
• A pair of comfy socks
• A piece of paper to write on
• A computer that allows you to visit the world from your desk

What might you want to add to this list? Think about what makes your daily life enjoyable and comfortable.  By paying attention to what is working in our life, we are more likely to adopt a positive attitude towards our future.

Practice Year-end Productivity

Get a jump on 2012. Follow these December productivity techniques to wrap up the business year and be ready to roll in 2012. Most of these tasks will individually take less than twenty minutes. So invest the time and get set up to be a more productive you in 2012.

• Clear out your desk drawer
• Wipe down your bookshelves in the office
• Purge any unneeded reference material, seminar binders.
• Update your credentials to reflect the year
• Update your contact management system with new contact information or changed addresses
• Clear unused files and folders off your computer desktop 

Looking for more tips? Check out the free monthly tips on my website.

This is Transition Your Life's 150th post. I started this blog in August of 2007 with the goal to write about transition and change. I also started a second blog in 2009 - Terry's Thinking which is designed for coaches, professional organizers and consultants.

Prepare some new ideas!

Creativity is not always at hand when we need it most. This is especially true when we are cooking up a transition in our lives. Sometimes we need to try to be extra creative, so we can get some new ideas that set us on our way.

The secret to being creative is trying to simply "be". Being isn't easy. It takes time. This time includes practice, persistence and above all, patience.

Here are six "be" concepts which can be done or not done. These ideas are in no particular order.

1. Be still
2. Be moving around
3. Be aware of your senses
4. Be willing to temporarily close out some of our senses
5. Be in a different environment
6. Be in our normal environment by just hanging in there with a different frame of mind

Let's think of creativity as a salad for those in the Northern hemisphere, and a soup, for those in the Southern hemisphere. It takes a few good ingredients to make a soup or salad special. Try a mixture of the ideas from numbers 1 - 6.

Let me know if you cook up any new ideas. You will be well on your way to preparing something good before long.

This is a best of post from 2009.