Hello folks, Dr Ro, hope you’re well. I have just five or eight minutes to share some wisdom with you and some thoughts in the middle of a full day’s presentation today.
I’m recording this in the first week-and-a-half in January and I think that 85% of people or more in the first two, three weeks of the New Year pretty much let things go that they set themselves as goals for the year.
Whether it’s losing weight, starting a new habit, reading more, meditating more. Whatever it is typically what happens is people go off the track.
Now one of the things that stops them doing that is distractions. I was travelling with my daughters and I took my eldest daughter and I said look about that. We were waiting to go through the flight and as we looked over families, people even with their kids everyone just sat on their phones.
Go back 20 years, people would have been communicating, reading may be engaging in something together. This time it’s just that, so I think we evolved into a cultural behaviour now where it is okay to be distracted. I mean it’s kind of just morphed into that behaviour pattern somebody picking up the phone to check it in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of the meeting, possibly waiting for it to start. There are many things that distract us.
But that’s just one of them digitally, but other things come down to basically lack of focus, lack of motivation, but also being bombarded with information. Right now as I’m recording this we’ve had all the issues going on with Covid. There’s a new lockdown in the UK. There’s lots of dispute going on about this online at the moment, some people taking the side of pro-Covid. Other people saying, well, actually, yes, it’s an issue, but is this the right way to manage it?
Then you put the US situation going on with the White House and from Donald Trump, that dialogue added to which schools, parents how do we manage that? There are so many distractions now and when people launch into a New Year like this there is a lot of aspiration and if you notice that shiny feel everybody had at the end of 2020, we’re eight days in and the edge has gone from it.
It’s a little bit dull.
There isn’t that same bubbly feeling a lot of people are hearing from us. I’ve fallen into that myself by having a busy week but it hasn’t distracted me from the main focus. I want to share four things I think would be incredibly useful for you.
Number one is to set your boundaries. For example, maybe it’s time to define when the phone goes away. What if you were to just simply allow the phone to be put away at 9.30, 10 o’clock at night, just so you remove yourself from the blue light and those distractions. What if you only picked up messages at certain times or you are only receiving calls at certain times? What if people who knew that you’re entrepreneurial, ideas driven creative type person often open to new ideas and talking to people, what if you said to them to let you know I’ve got three main projects going on this year and as much as I’m looking at opportunities that won’t be until the second part of the year. You close the door on those conversations, or you park them.
Without boundaries people don’t know whether they should contact you, interact with you, you can have anything from health boundaries, relationship boundaries, kid boundaries, professional boundaries, time boundaries. You decide but the key thing here starts to compartmentalise areas of your life so that the things you need to get done and you stay focused. Phones, do you switch it off at certain times of the day? Do you put it on mute? What is your relationship with this? Are you spending more time connecting with the kids?
Imagine spending a week and then on your phone there is a system that can operate and monitor you on how long you spend doing the same thing. If you found out you spent more time on this than you did talking to your children there is fundamentally something wrong there.
All I’m saying is, think about the things that could bring into your line of sight anything that could be a distraction, this is where we come back to focus now. If you’re a supporter of the Seekardo Show you get access to a whole series of my videos and there’s things depending on which level you are and one of them is time management and it’s really important this year to not take on too many things. Because it’s been such a tough year, I’ve found a lot of people have got massive projects.
The trouble with that is you set yourself too many targets and now you’re running around like a glass fly and again this is where you get distracted, you don’t spend time with the family, you don’t get the results you get to choose. We’ve got to narrow down and focus. I think if you get down to three core projects as opposed to six, for example, maybe put more effort into those you’re likely to get results on those three than you are with those six.
Again that’s down to your choice. But if there are cracks happening in your relationship there are cracks forming on a personal level at home and you are escaping, which is what some people are doing from the house to the office or whatever it is to get out because of lockdown else and you allow yourself to be distracted. You won’t get the results you need to get in your work and personal life as well. You might want to think, family, kids health, business and then at least that gives you a chance to think about what the focus is on those areas and then finally structure.
Put a structure to your day so you don’t allow those distractions to come in. You have a certain time looking at emails, after which you don’t look at any more until lunchtime, a certain time you read your messages potentially the most difficult one. Spend time with the family, exercise and you form a structure where there is a pattern to what you do to get into a rhythm.
Now it is difficult. You get an essential structure for a week.
I think it’s important to check in on these things because bad habits can creep in, distractions can keep creeping in. Gets to three months in and you say I’ll just drop that now and do this instead.
And then you can live in regret at the end of the year, and in particular with the situation of the rules being changed around us at the moment in this country so kingdom so that’s an important point to take on.
I shall see you on my next live.
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