Focus

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. Alexander Graham Bell

Every year l take a word to sum up how I am going to approach things for the year.

This years word is “Focus”.

I’ve given up on time management. This year my goal is focus management. I’ve realised that I can not mange time, all I can do is manage what I do in each moment of the day. So this year I have been exploring how I can manage to focus all my attention on the task in hand.

Things to think about:

1.How do you decide what to focus on?
2.How do you keep focus when there are so many things vying for your attention?
3.How do you maintain focus in the face of interruptions?
4.How do you switch focus to the next task without carrying over thoughts about the last one?

Might wanna do when…

• I like this idea of keeping  a list of possible  things to do when you are in certain locations, by city  / region  / county. So many times I read something about a great venue / restaurant / museum etc in a place I never expect to visit. I'm now going to start keeping these on file somewhere just in case I do end up in the location some time down the line.  Could easily keep the information somewhere in OneNote, although yet again I'd prefer to have it in the cloud (come on OneNote - deliver this please). Evernote would be another option I suppose.
 
• I picked up the idea from GTD Times the official blog of David Allen and the David Allen Company.  There are several other list ideas there too.
• What lists do you keep & where do you keep them?

I'm moving on to Tumblr

Well things have once again been pretty quiet on this blog. In an effort to get myself posting more often I've set myself the goal of posting daily onto my tumblr account, just to get back into the blogging habit. I'll be keeping this blog for OneNote 2010 stuff when it comes out of beta, until then please follow me on Tumblr and get your daily dose of productivity goodness there.
The RSS feed link is here.

Are You Ready for 2010

Following on from yesterdays post, Michael Deutch has posted the Balanced Score Card Strategy Map over at the MindJet Blog. He has provided a Template which can downloaded and also a great write up on how to use and expand on it. I'd recommend checking it out, along with all the other great resources on his site.

A simple Stategy Map Template

Here is a simple template I use when I begin my Strategy Mapping. Just use it to spark off ideas which I then add to the map as I go.