Staying on Task

 Why is it so challenging to stay focused, on something that will bring positive results?
It can be difficult to stay on task because of life's, simple distractions.

Whether you work for yourself or for an employer, spending hours surfing the net and updating your Facebook profile won’t get you any closer to your goals ... yet you find it hard to keep on-task.

Even when you do try to concentrate, you might get to 5pm and feel like you’ve not accomplished anything.

Here’s how to stay focused and get more done – every day.

Minimize Interruptions
If you live alone and work from home, interruptions are unlikely to be a big problem. If you work in a busy office and your job involves a lot of reactive tasks, like answering phone calls or emails from clients, you might be getting interrupted every few minutes.

Your target isn’t to cut out interruptions altogether – that’s not realistic – but to get rid of as many as you can. Some good ways to start are:

• Close your email program – if necessary, check it once every 30 minutes to ensure there’s nothing genuinely urgent


• Let your phone go to voicemail – or ask a colleague to cover it for an hour or two. (You can always return the favor at a later point.)


• Shut your office door. If you work in an open-plan office with other colleagues, putting on headphones will make others think twice about interrupting you to chat: it doesn’t matter whether you’re actually listening to music or not.

Get Prepared
Some tasks need a lot of concentration – like writing a report, coming up with a plan, or analyzing some complex data. If you’re tackling one of those, you don’t want to be breaking off every few minutes to find the right file. You definitely don’t want to be re-opening your email program to search for a crucial bit of information.

Before you get started on a big task, take a few minutes to make sure:

• You’ve got the information you’ll need (e.g. pull up relevant documents, make a quick phone call or print out emails)