With everything I am trying to balance in my life right now, it was hard for me to start writing this piece, (true story: It is due TOMORROW) and I am sure that I will get up no fewer than 3 – 5 times before it is finished.
I just get distracted. And my brain just moves from one thing to another really quickly. Like right now, I am thinking about my calls with clients tomorrow, what I am making for dinner, and dropping residency paperwork of at school to complete my boys’ pre-school registration. It is mentally exhausting. And I know that I am not alone.
According to an article in Psychology Today…
“As adolescence hits and you become more conscious of an inner life, many people notice that their mind is hard to control. Strange thoughts pop into awareness at odd moments. The mind likes to wander, like a young puppy sniffing around here and there. As frustrating as this tendency can be, it’s normal and it tends to stay this way through life. One reason for your wandering attention is that the nervous system is constantly processing, reconfiguring, and reconnecting the trillions of connections in your brain each moment. The term for this is “ambient neural activity”. If you were to look at the electrical activity even in a resting brain, it would look like planet earth from space with electrical storms lighting up different regions several times a second.”
I know I am not alone. If you, too find that you are a person who gets easily distracted to the extent that you are not getting the things done that you need to each day, here are a few tips and tricks to try:
• Recitation mantras – As I am making the rounds in my house in the morning and trying to get 4 kids out the door all while trying to queue up my work day, I break things down in 2’s and recite them over and over again. As I head up the stairs, “Toothbrushes, workout bag. Toothbrushes, workout bag. Over and over until I have those 2 things in hand, and then I can move on to the next pairing.
• Time Segmenters – At work, I use a tip called the Pomodoro (thanks Bill Farquharson for teaching me this one) – I attack an activity for 25 minutes, and then I take a break. When you mentally know that your task has a beginning and an end, at least from a time perspective, maybe not completion, it makes it a lot easier to tolerate. http://pomodorotechnique.com/
• Prioritization – ON the fly, and many times a day, I adjust my focus on what ABSOLUTLEY POSITIVLY has to get done today. I use a combination of my google calendar on my laptop and smart phone, dry erase boards in my kitchen and office and just my silly old scrappy brain. For me, I am managing not only my own personal and business lives, but 2 school aged kids and 2 toddlers as well as the household. Which brings me to my final points of the day
• Cut yourself some slack and…
• Celebrate the accomplishments
Adulting is hard. Working is hard. Getting Shit done is hard. So, if at the end of the day, you can say you did the very best that you could, pour yourself a glass of something, pat yourself on the back, and get ready to do it all again tomorrow. You’ll get better. Keep on.
As a sales and marketing coach and consultant at Success In Print, Kelly Mallozzi advocates for graphic arts companies to start a revolution and fight to keep print relevant. She may be irreverent, but what she lacks in convention, she makes up for in smart-assery.
Connect With Kelly: Twitter @SuccessInPrint and check out her weekly blog on Printing Impressions.
