Today’s blog is about cutting out the distractions. So i’m not going to play Battlefield 3 or watch Arsenal in Europe on Sky. It’s full focus on this post.
When you dream about building a business, you imagine all the amazing lives you might touch, or the impact you will have in your industry but you don’t realise at the outset that it’s lonely at the top.
As you climb the uphill journey into success, it’s exhilarating and thrilling, but it’s also lonely. When you are an onliner, particularly one who is building ecommerce stores, the activities that pay dividends are not the ones where you find yourself communicating with others.
I’m a people’s person, and so love communicating with others. As a personal development blogger and coach I loved being able to help people by answering their questions which related to problems they were dealing with or advising on how to personally grow. But financially this wasn’t helping me and alas I had to make changes, particularly the time I was spending in Facebook or looking at my friends blogs and leaving comments. I loved doing this but it was not being productive.
You only get paid for the results you generate, not the time and effort you put in. You have to focus on the value you’re creating and the results you’re getting. To me this meant cutting out much of the time I was interacting with others.
We all have to work hard to achieve success, and the one thing we always need is more hours in the day. It’s the one thing everyone wants, and yet it’s impossible to attain. So the one thing we can do is save ourselves time.
The lesson I learnt was that you have to eliminate unimportant and unproductive tasks and replace them with value-added ones. There are many time wasters that will really eat into your time if you allow them to. To free up your time you need to identify those time wasters, decide what you want to do about them and then take action.
There are so many things distracting. The challenge is that we have not realized the true cost of distractions: they use up what is actually a limited supply of attention each day, and make us far less effective if we need to do deeper thinking work. Distractions are everywhere. If you are serious about being the most effective you can be and as I am doing building a successful business, well then you have to kick those distractions into touch.
Once distracted it can take you up to 25 minutes to return to the original task, if you get around to it at all. I’m one that has to pay careful attention to what I am doing because I am easily persuaded to move from one job to another. As I know its best to stick to one thing and get it done.
A lot of things will try to distract your attention from doing those activities which have the big pay off, when building your online business. But you must not allow those things to take root. You need to develop habits of discipline, integrity and focus.
You spend your day doing unnecessary activities.
Then, you wish you could have that time back.
We are all guilty of doing this at one time or another.
We all have the same amount of time in the day.
It all comes down to how you chose to spend yours.
Avoiding time-wasting activities can make all the difference.
I had to give up doing things I enjoyed but that weren’t productive for the business I was building.
- Commenting on blogs
- Talking to other bloggers
- Surfing the web endlessly.
- Constantly updating my social media status.
- Instant Messaging with friends
- Reading everything on Skysports.com and Arseblog.com
We all need to be more vigilant about allowing distractions to steal our attention. Instead focus on the things you need to be doing. Once they’re done you will have more time to spend doing things you enjoy that have no financial reward.
My theory is that I have to focus on doing my work when online instead of talking to others, but once all my shops are finally built, I can go back to being a social animal once again. But right now cutting out the distractions is essential.
