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Five Questions to Keep Yourself Focused
Filed under Self DisciplineFeb 15Here are five questions that you can ask over and over again until they become a habit, guiding you to always using your time at the very highest level.
1. Develop the habit of asking, “Why am I on the payroll?” What have I been hired to accomplish? What specific measurable results are expected of me at my work? If I were trying to explain to someone else why they pay me money at my job, what reasons would I give? Most people fall into the habit of thinking that, because they are at work, they are working. They confuse activities with accomplishments. They are often busy all day doing more and more things of lesser and lesser importance. At the end of the day, they claim to be exhausted or stressed out, but they have accomplished very little. They fail to ask themselves, “Why am I on the payroll?”
2. Develop the habit of asking, “What are my highest value activities?” Whatare the most important things that you do each day in your work? If you were to take a list of all of your activities, tasks and potential results to your boss, and ask your boss to select the three most important things you do, what would he tell you? If you are your own boss, remember that there are usually three tasks or activities that account for 90% or more of the value that you contribute to your work or business. Almost everything else you do is a support activity for those three tasks. Most of your activities are tasks you think you need to do, in order to do the things for which you are actually paid, and which have the highest value. What are the three most valuable things you do in your work?
3. Develop the habit of asking the question, “What can I, and only I do, that if done well, will make a real difference?” The answer to this question is something that you and only you can do. If you don’t do it, it will not be done by someone else. But if you do it, and you do it well, it can make the greatest single contribution to your work and to your company at that moment. What is it?
4. Develop the habit of asking this question, “If I could only do one thing all day long, what one thing do I do that contributes the greatest value to my company?” If you were to list everything that you do on a piece of paper, you would find that there is one task that, if you did it consistently well, repeatedly, over and over, all day long, this one task would contribute more value than any of your other tasks, or all of your other tasks put together.
What one task or activity, which is the highest use of your talents and abilities, if you could do it all day long, would contribute the very most to your work and your life? How could you organize your time and your work so that you are focusing more and more on this single task? One of the most important keys to personal effectiveness is for you to develop the habit of spending more time, and becoming more skilled, at those few activities
that contribute the greatest value to your work. Everything else you do is usually of lower value than these essential tasks.
5. Perhaps the most important habit you can develop in personal management is the habit of asking, “What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?” There is always an answer to this question, for every minute and every hour. Your ability to accurately ask and answer this question is the key to high performance, maximum productivity, personal effectiveness and great success. In its simplest terms, people succeed because they develop the habit of consistently working on the one thing that can give them the highest rate of return on energy, and life, out of all the things they could possibly be doing at the moment. People fail because they are unable or unwilling to determine their true priorities, or they are not then disciplined enough to work on their key tasks exclusively until they are complete.
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