Here are some techniques that are different kinds of suggestions for getting things in focus and keeping your focus sharp.  If you find that none of the techniques work, you may want to examine what you are trying to focus on.  In some cases, being able to gain some clarity on what to focus on is all that is needed to achieve greater focus.  Gaining clarity can mean becoming more specific, becoming more general, or even shifting to a completely different focus area.    If you have some techniques that have worked for you that are not listed here, please share them!

ONE Reminder

Associate a thing that is with you all day with your desired focus.  This could be a piece of jewelry, a pen, a photograph, an article of clothing, or something written that describes your focus.  Forge a mental bridge between the two to remind you of your desired focus throughout the day. 

TWO Quadrants 

To those of you familiar with Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you can divide up your time/energy into 4 Quadrants.  To focus on achieving your highest priorities, only do things that fall into the two most important quadrants. Those are labeled, “The Quadrant of Necessity” and “The Quadrant of Productivity and Balance.” The quadrant of necessity contains tasks that must be done and are important.  The “Quadrant of Productivity and Balance” contains items that are important but not urgent, like building stronger relationships, health, and long term goals and visions.  By only working in these two most important quadrants, you consistently keep yourself focused on achieving your highest priorities.  The other two quadrants are “Urgent not important” and “Not urgent, not important.”  These quadrants contain things like interruptions, some phone calls and meetings, emails, other peoples’ issues, and general time wasters. The idea is to avoid these whenever you can when you know you need to maintain your focus!  

Pick THREE

Firtst thing in the morning, select your three most important priorities for that day.This could be spending one hour on a report, exercising, making a difficult phone call, or genuinely trying to maintain a sense of calm all day.  Keep your focus on those things throughout the day as you go from activity to activity.

Eliminate FOUR 

Distractions can grab your attention and derail your focus!  Know what your top distractions are and avoid them.   Conversely, know what will enhance your focus.  This is a very valuable exploration and you most probably already have a good sense of these things for yourself.   For me background music, a messy office, new email announcements, and the phone will distract me and drain my focus when I am writing.  I have learned to turn off email, music, and the phones, and to leave my messy office when I need to focus on writing. What enhances my writing focus is scheduling three hours of uninterrupted time for it, not being in my office, and instead being in a clean space that looks outdoors.

Know your FIVE to SEVEN

Every job can be broken down into a minimum of five key results areas.  Know what these key results areas are, and make sure you are providing a regular focus on each.   These are the results that you absolutely, must have in order to fulfill your responsibilities and make a maximum contribution to the issue at hand.  Key results are like vital functions of the body — blood pressure, heart rate, brain waves, breathing, and nutrition.  A manager’s key results areas might be: planning for new work, supervising people, reporting, presenting, organizing, and current tasks.  Taken from “Step 6″ in Eat That Frog!, a book by Brian Tracy

TEN ways to say No

Learn at least ten ways to say NO to unimportant interruptions.  These vary in firmness and friendliness, and you can explore how to make even the “very firm” ones sound pleasant coming from you!

 So for example, when someone interrupts what you are doing and asks “Can you help me with this right now?” you can try these out:

 ”I’d like to help and don’t have the time to do it properly right now.”

“I can’t right now, but Chris might be able to.”

“I have quite a few commitments right now; I feel like it would be unfair to the other commitments for me to take that on.”

“Yes, when it is on the top of my priority list, and right now it is not.”

“I’m honored you asked me, and sorry to say that I can’t.”

“Can you check back with me next week on that?”

“Here’s the impact to me if I help you right now…”

“Yes and it will cost this much money.”

“I would love to help you if I had the time.”

“Sorry, No, I’m busy right now.”

Try FIFTEEN

If you have no time, and are so busy that you are unable to focus in on something really big and important, the first step you need to take is to find time for it.  You can do anything for 15 minutes. You have to start with baby steps, and consistency is the key to creating change and forging a lifelong habit.  The first fifteen minutes you spend might be to get clarity, to learn more, to create a plan. Try creating a daily focus on “finding time.” Taken from Marla Cilley, aka “The Fly Lady”, at www.flylady.net

 PS - I wrote this a while ago, and just went back to it, when I noticed this morning, my focus has been drifting – it helped  :)

Free….is it the future?  So some say!  

Two diverse points of view are bubbling here:

The first is Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free, The Future of a Radical Price”: http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/

The second is from the New Yorker, Malcolm Galdwell’s review of Chris’s book: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all

What do I give away free in my business?

1. Coaching Samples!  – Because coaching is best understood by trying it for free.

http://www.starleadershipllc.com/coaching/FreeCoaching.html

2. A free newsletter – Elements, it’s been in production since 2000

http://www.starleadershipllc.com/stuff/newsletter.htm

3. This fall I will be releasing a free eBook, Tick Tock: Be the Star of your own Time!

This eBook is based on Time Management workshops I created and have delivered many times.   My approach to time management is hands-on and practical and holistic.  Effective time management is different for everyone, because everyone has different priorities and ways of working. This addresses many different methods and styles

Topic: “Goals: Good, Bad and Ugly”

Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2009, 7:00 PM at The Yard Restaurant, Manchester, NH

Featured guest: Star Dargin

More about the evening: Having goals and achieving them are two very different things. If you find yourself stuck or stalled in achieving a goal, then you may need to try a different approach. This talk will introduce a new tool for troubleshooting stalled out goals. Each participant will fill out the tool and try some troubleshooting. The goal is for you to leave with one or more new ideas or approaches for getting your job search moving forward towards the goal of being hired!

About the speaker: Star Dargin is the founder and has been creating the vision and direction for Star Leadership LLC since 1996. Star has eclectic background experience in engineering, leadership, organizational management, project management, consultation, teaching and coaching. Her client experience includes industries and operations in publishing, high technology, small business, bio-technology, university and other learning institutions, state agencies, and freelance independent workers. She works as an independent professional AND collaboratively with other coaches and trainers to provide her clients with complete solutions. She is a certified coach and has developed and delivered training for middle to senior level professionals who are smart, ready for a change, have been successful in their content area and are now stalled or stuck. Star Leadership LLC is a seasoned management consulting firm that offers coaching, training and consulting services for businesses.

http://www.nutfieldnetworking.com/next_meeting.asp

Hope to see you there!

Call or email if you have any questions or can’t make it and would like the handouts.

Star

The second portion of the meeting, as always, will be for networking.

Information on Past Nutfield Networking meetings.

It seems there is always too much to do and too little time.  Sometimes when we end the day or year, and look back, we wonder, what did we DO?  Where did the time go?

Doing” is the thing that moves you or your team or your community forward.  An interesting and useful question to reflect on can be where is all this “doing” taking me and how fast or slow will it take to get me there?  

One big personal lesson in doing for me was to learn to do something despite any associated fear I may have about it.  This is an ongoing lesson that shifts its character based on the situation I’m dealing with.  I remember just having gotten my driver’s license and I was afraid of getting lost.   My plan to overcome this was to get lost!  I drove into Boston by myself, without any preplanning or maps, and got myself completely lost.  Years later, I intentionally did it again, in a foreign country, on foot, where English was not the native language.  The good news is I always found my way, and developed some helpful strategies along the way, too!  These exercises in getting lost have helped me have less fear of being lost as well as more confidence in taking action on things that I fear.

Everyone is different in how they approach or do not approach “doing.”  Nike encourages us to “Just do it.”  Many experts talk about planning and goal setting before taking action.  Every individual has a personal approach or process for gearing up into action.   Because of the personal/experiential nature of “doing,” this edition of Elements, as well as Part 2 later this summer, has snippets from the thoughts and experience of various well-known experts such as Steven Covey, Brian Tracy, T. Harv Eker, Marshall Goldmith, and Daniel Goleman.

To be effective leaders, we are often required to do things in a way that they have not been 

Communication Passing Information

Learning how to communicate has always been an active part of my, life and has heavily influenced some life choices I have made. My decision to move away from being a software engineer, over 20 years ago,  to more of a management role partially came about when I realized that I was surrounded by engineers who were more brilliant and productive then I could ever be, yet nobody could really recognize the value of their engineering contributions because they were, in general, poor communicators. Some of them would spend days and nights in their offices doing work that never saw the light of day or when it did, it was controversial or not useful simply because they could not make themselves understood clearly to their audiences. By helping them to translate “engineer speak” into “business speak,” I hope I was able to leverage their good efforts to so it could be of more benefit to them and their companies!

I first acted on my interest in communication in a formal way when I was 16 years old. Though not interested in nursing, I paid out of my own pocket, $39, for a day-long workshop for nurses on how to communicate with doctors. The course covered some of the different basic styles of communication: Aggressive, Assertive, and Passive. It was aimed at teaching nurses how to be more assertive with doctors and, in retrospect, I can see that it was not much different from my own or others’ current communications workshops. Good communications awareness and techniques stand the test of time. I am still learning to communicate and while I do not consider myself an expert, I am very much an avid learner about, and observer of, communication!

Here are some great quotes, from some communication “greats!”

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate —Luke from Cool Hand Luke played by Paul Newman

Self-expression must pass into communication for fulfillment. –Pearl S. Buck

The problem with communication is the illusion that is has been accomplished. –George Bernard Shaw

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind –Rudyard Kipling

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them –Stephen King

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. –Mother Teresa

How do I look?

For many years I have taught workshops on communication with individuals and groups, and it’s pretty clear to see that there are two main keys to improving personal communication: Practice & Feedback. Practice, we all know is important for getting good at anything. And feedback, too, is a vital tool. The feedback can come from yourself (that is, your own “sense” of how you carried out your communication), from other students, and/or from audio or video recordings of yourself in action.

The list below represents some of the most common communication issues and strategies that I have observed between people communicating to individuals or groups:

1. If telling a story, is it appropriate? Stories can be powerful, can keep an audience’s attention, and help them relate to a situation that you are highlighting – if the story is right for the setting and the people hearing it.

2. Should information be pushed or pulled? “Get out!! Fire!” is an example of “pushing” information and as such is appropriate for that situation. “Pulling” information is when observations and questions are used to draw out the information from your listeners. Pulling information can help an audience stay awake, keep them connected to you and your topic and can allows them to feel that they are working side-by-side with you as part of an emerging solution.

3. Can silence be used? Stopping to let your communication “sink in” can be a powerful communication strategy. Also, using silence to get a reading on how the audience is reacting before proceeding can be very useful for you. In great storytelling, using silence at a critical juncture can heighten an effect that you would like to create.

4. What’s going on with body language? Imagine a spectrum of behaviors that at one end shows a person appearing relaxed, expansive, confident, and connected to their listeners, and at the other end shows someone painfully nervous and uncomfortable, appearing either fidgety or frozen to the spot. Sometimes what a person is thinking and feeling is not projected at all by their body language, and this almost always serves to create a sense of tension and dissonance in the observer, which most people speaking to others do not want to have happen! Watching TV without the sound on, and trying to guess what’s going on based on body language, is a fun way to practice reading body language.

5. Is the audience connected to the communication? – There are an array of behaviors that can allow you to “check in” to see if your audience feels like they are being “responded to.” Some areas to check with in your audience are: eye contact, position of body or posture in chair (are they leaning forward? on edge of seat?), is their posture open or closed what is your sense of their alertness or emotions (are they nodding in agreement, frowning, squinting, blank/impassive). All of these “clues” can help you stay connected to your audience, and help them stay connected to you!

6. Is your voice clear and understandable? Sometimes a speaker’s voice is too soft or too loud or conveys an underlying emotion that’s not desired for the communication. Speaking too fast, using slang, and speaking with a heavy accent can also make content less clear. One classic suggestion to improve your speaking voice is to listen to national news anchors and try to emulate their diction.

7. What planning is needed for a successful communication? How much research needs to be done before the communication starts? For example, is the bottom line of what needs to be conveyed clear? Are there time limits? If not, what would be an effective time limit for this communication and this group? Who is the intended audience and what is known about them? Is there an agenda or event structure to be worked with?

8. Is Are technology and props helping or hurting the communication? Slides, props, and visuals can all make a more powerful communication if used properly, as long as they don’t become the focal point of your talk.

9. Can humor be used? Smiling at the audience, and laughing with them makes it easier to learn, easier to connect, and creates a comfortable environment in which communication can flow more easily.

10. What is the bottom line? What specific words can be used? What level of detail is required? What are the main points? What would make this clearer? Does your entire talk drive to the bottom line? Are all your points, stories and examples heading there? Have you appropriately repeated and reinforced your bottom line? Does your audience know what you want them to do about it?

You may already be stellar at one or more of the above techniques yet there is always room for improvement. The key is to identify which areas need improvement and then find a mechanism that works for you to improve. I once worked with a manger who was able to overcame her fear of not connecting to the audience after she discovered that it was the “eyes looking at her” that paralyzed her. Her solution was to cut out pictures of eyes from fashion magazines and practice with these “eye pictures” looking at her until she was comfortable seeing lots of eyes turned on her. At her first team meeting she put up the eye pictures and told the team her story. This served a number of purposes – it allowed her to display playful self-targeted humor, helped her to connect on a personal level with her audience, and provided a useable and successful strategy that allowed her fear of “eyes” to disappear! Another example that worked for a student was to keep an index card with the word “UM” on it in his hands while speaking. It reminded him not to say “UM,” and he managed to give his last presentation with only one “UM” slipping through!

Wheel of Balance for Job Performance

My Time Management

Satisfied with My Job Performance

Staying Organized

Timely with Duties and Projects

Get Along with Collegues and Clients

Clear about My Role and Duties

Satisfied with My Team Participation

Staying on top of email, voicemail

This wheel is from exercises in the book, “Co-Active Coaching, New Skills for Coaching People Towards Success in Work and Life“, by Laura Witwroth, Henry Kimsey-House and Phil Sandal.

Wheel of Project Assessement

Sample project segments to balance a project (click for wheel):

• cost

• meeting milestones

• tracking status

• team

• clients/customer

• sponsor

• issue resolution

• quality

The concept of a wheel as a tool was adapted from the book, “Co-Active Coaching”.

I added the idea of using it to get a quick assessment for a project and the eigth project slides.

Sample life segments to keep in balance (click for wheel): 

1. money

2. family

3. fun and recreation

4. physical environment

5. job/career

6. personal growth

7. health

8. friends

This wheel is from exercises in the book, “Co-Active Coaching, New Skills for Coaching People Towards Success in Work and Life“, by Laura Witwroth, Henry Kimsey-House and Phil Sandal.