The Power of Daily Focused Blocks
Focused Schedule to complete the most important tasks
If there are nine rabbits on the ground, if you want to catch one, just focus on one.— Jack Ma
As an IT professional within the IT consulting world, every day I will be bombarded with urgent email messages from my manager or project leader. I have an obligation to constantly monitor my outlook to check the emails and respond. Sometimes I will question myself about what value I am providing to my company and there is no metric to measure the value being generated by the company.
Most of us suffer from this productivity paradox. Then do we have any solution for this problem?
I recently learned from the book ‘Managing-Your-Day-To-Day’ about this topic.
Cal Newport, a writer, and a professor at Georgetown University suggests a new approach to tackle this issue.
He calls this ‘The Daily Focus Blocks’.
The focus block helps to schedule your time for one of your most important work. This work should help to move further in your main goal of the day.
How do we know which work is the most important work? The single most important change we can make in our life is to do creative work first and reactive work later.
This means blocking a chunk of time every day for creative work of our own priorities without any distractions.
We can mark this time on our calendar like any other meeting. Blocking time is one part but we also need to resist other distractions like emails, phone calls, or social media during this time, ignoring the news.
In order to implement this method, Cal Newport suggests the below steps.
- Start small: A good rule of thumb is to start with 25 mins at a time. Gradually increase to one hour and further. The key is never to allow any distractions.
- Tackle a clearly identified task: Having a clear goal let's say we have to write an article draft or edit an article during this block time will help you more.
- Use different locations: Move to a different room or a library or even a quiet place to perform this focused work.
“Starve your distraction and feed your focus.”
Make sure we give the right amount of time to the people, projects, and the purpose that matters most.
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