When deciding what’s important in your life, things don’t always align perfectly. For example you may be very career focused but also have a family that you care for and make time for. From the standpoint of focusing on your career, it’d be easier if you didn’t have to spend the time with your family. But to be a well rounded person, it’s important that you have multiple areas of interest and are able to find balance between them.
When you sit down and try to focus on something, it can be hard to get momentum going. Our minds have a knack of putting other, more desirable options in front of us to make us question if we’re spending our time wisely.
Understanding this mechanism is important for two reasons:
- It will reveal your value system
- If left unchecked, it will prevent you from actually accomplishing anything
In regards to the first point, when you sit down with the intention of doing something productive, watch and see what your mind throws at you to try to get you off task.
Generally these will fall into three categories:
- Things that are important to you
- Superficial things that seem interesting but don’t really matter
- Things that are actually destructive or counterproductive
For things that are actually important to you, be sure to schedule time for those things but to not let them be an excuse not to focus in that moment. For the last two, it’s important to be aware of those so you know to avoid them.
In regards to the second point about keeping this mental mechanism in check, doing this is how you will actually make progress.
It’s important to understand that when you value multiple things, your mind will always question whether what you’re doing now is the best thing to be doing. If you let that go on unchecked, you’ll never end up doing anything.
For example, say you’re trying to read 20 pages of a book and your mind is guilting you with the “You should go out and be social.” Then you decide to go out and be social and your mind flips to “Should you really be out right now? You have important things to do like read your book.” It’s a no win, no productivity conundrum.
That’s why you need to plan out what you want and how you’re going to accomplish it because if left to the whims of our mind, we’ll just swing from one branch to the next never really accomplishing anything or getting anywhere.
Schedule the time to read your book and also make a point of finding social things and going and doing them. Also remain flexible in when you do things because you may be invited out to do something you want to do and it’s important to do that rather than be so rigid in your routine that you decline the invitation because you were planning on reading your book.
So find the things that are important to you, schedule time for them and stay focus when doing them. You’ll have a great sense of accomplishment and progress when you do this and also things that were neutral or negative in your life will start to slip away. You just don’t have time for them anymore.