The best thing about Social Media is how it is always brimming with ideas. Whether you’re looking for some writing prompts or DIY inspirations, it’s all on there. However, easy as it is to find your way to talented people, see their work and get inspired in a moment, it can be extremely counter-productive if it ends up cluttering your life with too many activities. So, unless you’ve got your priorities right, you might lose sight of your goals and end up trying to be the jack of all trades, master of none.
Masterchef Australia awakened the sleeping gourmet chefs in many people. It gave them a sense of pride to prepare a restaurant-style meal and dessert at home. Many started experimenting with novel ways of cooking, and it became contagious. A few years back, the running fever had caught fire everywhere. People say that running a marathon tests one’s willpower and physical strength. Runners felt immensely satisfied to take up the challenge and complete a run. Then, a few others took up reading challenges and writing challenges. Some went a step ahead and took to traveling to explore places around the world and gratify their wanderlust. People were actively working out and finding out engaging ways to make a workout interesting. With so much happening all around, suddenly there was so much to do for people like me who were sitting idle and waiting to be inspired. Just the thought of the variety of activities on offer seemed exciting, and many of us dived headlong with the intention of trying to do as much as possible.
When you’re trying to stay focussed, one huge decision is not always going to make a big difference. What matters more are those small decisions that you take every single day in accordance with your priorities. Those are the decisions that help you get closer to your goals.
I was genuinely interested in a few of the activities and wanted to do something different from my usual routine. However, a couple of months after I embarked on these activities, I realized I’d bitten off more than what I could chew. I knew this because I was exhausted. I had baked a lot of cakes, cooked lot of dishes much to my dietitian's displeasure and then ran to burn those calories. Neither did I write as much as I wanted to, nor did I complete reading the books I’d picked up. My keyboard instructor gave up convincing me to attend her classes. two months of Zumba classes later, I was looking for ways to get back to my gym. Instead of aiming for one dartboard, the genius that I was, I thought I could aim for five to six dartboards hoping that I would end up hitting at least one bull's-eye. But everything fell apart.
The Curious Case of Scanners
Barbara Sher, popular life coach and author of
What Do I Do when I Want To Do Everything, believes that people fall into two categories — divers and scanners. Divers are perfectionists who wouldn’t mind doing something over and over again to master their skills. They tend to focus on one hobby or profession all their life and stick to it. Scanners, on the other hand, are endlessly inquisitive people who churn out ideas faster than they can handle and rapidly move on from one idea to another. They are not specialists, they have quite a number of unrelated interests and work on several projects at the same time. They do not deep-dive into a project; once they grasp the concept or are satisfied with what they’ve done, they just move on. Sher has praise for scanners as she feels that they look at the world like a candy store full of endless, fascinating opportunities and they try to make the best of it.
Conventionally, people believed that all scanners are dabblers. Contrary to popular opinion, there are many successful scanners who have gone on to accomplish all their goals. The problem arises when scanners start out with brilliant ideas but lose sight of their vision and end up with half-baked skills. You know there is something wrong when people continuously move from one idea to another without properly working on any of them either because they are unable to make up their mind or simply because they are scared to commit themselves to it. When people start multi-tasking mindlessly, that’s when things start getting out of control. That’s how scanners turn into dabblers and that’s precisely how I almost became a dabbler (if only I’d prioritised).
You cannot be a superstar if you divert your attention to multiple things at the same time. There is always going to be a lot to do at any given point in time. It ultimately comes down to how you choose to spend your time with the tasks that you pick. Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix might help you identify tasks that are important vs. urgent and the ones to be ignored.
However, what’s crucial is how you set to act when dealing with important tasks. Once you evaluate the significance of each task, you will be able to come up with an action plan and with a clear idea of what exactly you’re going to be doing. This is what Stephen Covey calls ‘sharpening the saw’ where you take time to plan and prioritise, which is more important than implementing the idea itself.
When you plan, you have a clear idea of what you should be doing, and you will be way more productive than when you start working without a plan. Unless you carefully gauge the importance and prioritise, everything will seem important. You’ll then end up in a mess and never have time to complete your work. Most people in this phase just say they are busy. We need to stop glorifying being busy. Almost always, it’s just a case of badly-managed priorities. Setting one’s priorities straight is what marks the difference between a scanner and a dabbler.
Warren Buffett’s Strategy
Warren Buffett, one of the world's most successful investors and business magnates, has the right strategy for people who want to maximise their focus and achieve their goals.
1. Make a list of the top 25 goals you want to accomplish in life.
2. Review your list and pick the 5 most important goals that really matter to you in the long run.
3. Devise an action plan and start working on your 5 goals right away. Stay away from the other 20 items on your list. Go back to them ONLY when you’re done with the Top 5 list.
If you think this strategy is pretty simple, then you haven’t understood how it works. Through this strategy, Warren Buffett helps us understand what really matters and what can wait. It is easy to list down 25 things that you may want to do in life but picking the top 5 is not simple. Everything on that list might be important and that is precisely why you need to pick the ones with the highest priority. This is a way of asserting what you would live and breathe for the next couple of years and, more importantly, what you would not spend your time doing. You win some, you lose some.
How to say no?
One of the main reasons Warren Buffet’s strategy is effective is because it helps us eliminate ruthlessly. Many of us are nowhere near achieving our targets despite putting our heart and soul into them because we spend time on the things we need to stay away from. Distractions are detrimental to our goals and eliminating what is inessential will go a long way in helping us focus on what really matters.
Again, to be able to say ‘No’ firmly, we should first have a plan and make our priorities clear. This would make it easier for us to evaluate ad-hoc tasks against our plan and take a call on whether they are worth our time. If we don’t have a plan, we will always be under the impression that we will somehow be able to accommodate everything that comes our way. And that’s the perfect recipe for a disaster.
When you come across a brilliant idea and want to work on it, ask yourself these questions:
1. Is it aligned to any of my goals from my Top 5 list?
2. Will it benefit any of the current goals I’m working on?
3. Will it make a difference to me, now or in the future?
If you had to answer ‘No’ for any of these questions, then your ‘brilliant idea’ is most likely just a distraction in disguise.
So, after reading about Warren Buffet’s strategy, I decided to make some amends in my life. I listed out all the activities I was pursuing. To be honest, I had no idea why I even pursued some of them. After a lot of strategising and re-strategising, I came up with my Top 5 list. I decided that until I’d had enough, I would never go back to my other list. Initially, I found it difficult to be stuck with just a few activities as my mind wandered through all the other stuff that I used to be doing. Initially, it was quite difficult to focus. But slowly, I liked how I was able to work on my goals and still get time for myself. It was as if I’d successfully completed my spring cleaning and eliminated all forms of clutter from my life. I still have a long way to go before I can reach my target but at least I know I’m on the right track.
When you’re trying to stay focussed, one huge decision is not always going to make a big difference. What matters more are those small decisions that you take every single day in accordance with your priorities. Those are the decisions that help us get closer to our goals. When you find yourself in a dilemma and have a lot of things to do, it is seldom about shortage of time, but simply about how much you are asking of it. It’s what you choose to do. Only by saying no to what’s unimportant can we prioritise what is important. Only when we focus on what really matters will we be able to truly accomplish our goals and realise our vision. You can never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks — or, at any rate, you'll take much longer to reach it, and have ravaged hands to show for it.
