Today’s winner is Jared, for recognizing that social media has begun to shape the way we spend our time and presents a whole new set of challenges.

Jared wins a copy of Rodger’s Get Focused course, which should help him to deal with those challenges. Congratulations, Jared!

Don’t miss Rodger’s last post in this series and a chance to win one more prize.

Deadlines are helpful in staying focused. Even if they are self-imposed deadlines, i.e. setting a goal to have a certain amount of work done before lunch.

Don’t you think in an office that people present the most interruptions?

There are techniques that can be used to reduce interruptions by people. For example:
1)when people stop by your desk to talk, answer their question kindly and turn back to your work.
2) standing when someone enters the room puts you in control of the length of the interrruption
3) if someone asks for your assistance and it is not necessary that it be handled immediately, then schedule a later time to handle the matter.
4) let co-workers or family know when you need uninterrupted time. They will get on board to assist in that; they can’t help with what they are unaware of.

I think another good way to refocus and reduce distractions is to read great post like these and get motivated again.

I suggest to plan a week at a time and adjust your schedule using a outlook, or even Achieve Planner to map your time out and do your best to stick to it.

Before you know it, it will become the ‘familiar’ track and you are making inroads to projects and tasks that were sitting there waiting for spare time that you just never seem to find.

Yes, i think we are all guilty at times of being our own worse enemy. Starting my work life in the early 90s, terms like multi-tasking, multi-skilling were supposed ways to fast track your career, as such i potentially fall victim to being the ‘Jack of all trades, master of none” A varied skill set diminishes the focus on a specialised one, even though competancy is very high, i think society today cant fathom operating at this level. Im not blowing my own trumpet here, but the key here is to focus your efforts to achieve your target goal.

My skill set is wide and varied, i love learning and will continue to do so, until the day i die, but my biggest goal right now is learning to manage my workload including life ‘load’ and knowing when i don’t have time to work on a personal interest, and rather focus on the higher goals and priorities.

I have to break my old habit of scheduling a full days work, but not accounting for breaks, interruptions and emergency work.

Im endevouring to apply the Pareto’s principle ; the 80/20 rule. This comes into effect on many levels.
80% of my income comes from 20% of my work.
80% of the work comes from 20% of my clients base
80% of my emails are trivial and 20% of emails are valuable.

A spin off of the 80/20 rule is if i plan 80% of my day i can accommodate minor interruptions/ urgent matters without derailing my schedule. Without going haywire and falling behind in my work.

Once i have started to sort this out (getting Focused), i believe i can then really have time to do a better job and have more time to do the things i like to do in my spare time. Basically being more productive!

Im sure this resonates with many of you.

For many years, I believed that a messy desk was the sign of an active mind (!). Gradually, I grew past my tendency to create random piles of “TBD” paperwork, and now I can’t imagine how I got anything done that way. A clean desk and orderly workplace *really do* make it easier to find what you need, when you need it. A minute spent digging out a crucial file doesn’t sound like much, but multiply that by 100 each week, and it adds up in a hurry.

Great points about multi-tasking and interruptions, too. The always-sharp Peter Bregman touches on this in his most recent post for Harvard Business Publishing, “The Cardinal Rule of Rules” (http://bit.ly/dDozBR).

Agreed that complex tasks that require deep thought are handled best with single-minded focus and concentration. Has anyone found a good way to achieve this in an open-office-type environment?

I think the idea of focus is very important now that many of us are also involved with social media and other interactive services on the web. We have a lot of different “inputs” which all feed conveniently onto the same machine: the computer we’re working on. It’s easy to hop on the S.S. Avoidance, as Marc put it in his great comment yesterday, and to keep moving or cycling through things we’d rather be doing instead of focusing on one task at a time.

Plus, many social media services are both dense (with a lot of information) and scattered (with a diverse collection or range of input that doesn’t always inter-relate). If you’re like me, your Twitter feed has a wide range of tweets about a wide variety of topics coming from people doing vastly different things in different time zones. It’s easy to jump around almost randomly, but are we losing our ability to concentrate? How often do you click on the link for an article or blog post online and actually read the whole thing? (Hopefully you did with this one.)

Social media services can be very useful – and enjoyable – but they can also lead to some challenges when it comes to focus. Learning how to participate in productive ways without sacrificing other priorities (or your sanity) is becoming a very useful skill.