I’m the easiest person to get sucked into distractions

Hello Coach,  

I hope you are ready to kick off this week with a lot of ambition and hope and faith and competence and readiness. 

You may not know this about me, but I’m the easiest person to get sucked into distractions. I know that social media can kill my morning and kill my day.

I know that I am a consumer. It’s easy for me to just kind of bounce around website to website, podcast to podcast, social media to social media. And I could do that happily for hours on end during the day.

And then by the end of the week, I’d end up with no further advancement to the real dreams, the real connections, or the real meaningful pursuits that matter to me.

Often coaches see all of this productivity stuff I talk about and think that I am the most productive and disciplined person they know. 

Nope. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

I HAD to start this productivity journey because I needed to play defense against my own psychology. 

I was burning out because of the way I was showing up to work.   

When I write or speak about this topic, I’m not bragging about my superhuman discipline. I HAVE to still do the work to keep myself on track, even after all of the books, training, and courses on being productive that I have been through. 

Like everybody else, I still have to play defense against the world’s highest paid engineers creating very sticky and distracting products that are trying to steal my attention. 

I really struggle with this actually. 

I had to establish a morning routine that helps me avoid getting sucked into these distractions.

My morning routine consists of looking at my ambitions and goals in the morning, I listen to something inspiring, I set my morning mindset, I capture my goals and think through specifically what I need to do this day and to complete by the end of this week.

If I don’t do those things each day, I’m Mrs. distraction and I get pulled into every different direction.

You know, so often we don’t think it’s a big deal if we lose an hour here or there to distraction.

I want you to think about it this way.  An hour a day lost to distraction is 30 hours a month. That’s almost a full complete work week. 

But what if it’s two hours of distraction a day? Well, now 60 hours are gone a week to distraction. That’s more than a full-time job.

Think about how that adds up over the course of the year. 

Scrolling social media didn’t advance your life one bit. You might have seen what is trending on instagram, watched a bunch of dad jokes, some funny dog or cat videos, you might have caught up with what your friends kids are up to. 

I’m not saying this because I hate social media.    

I am sharing all of this with you because I want you to be thoughtful about where your time is going this week so you don’t make the same mistakes I was and still make. 

I know that the work you have to do at times can be pretty overwhelming.

But tomorrow is the beginning of a new week.

To help you calibrate and set your focus for the week, ask yourself these questions. 

Have you set up your plan of attack?  

Did you write down or review your goals?  

Did you set some deadlines or reminders?  

Have you put some notes around the house to remind you to be intentional?  

Have you thought through how you are going to start the week on your A game? (You have a choice to start the week with high intention and focus or you can start the week in total reactivity.) 

Did you set yourself your family your kids up for success this week or will it be just another Monday bumbling in to the noise and reacting to everything?  

Have you decided what’s important to you this week?  

As the week goes on, do you have a practice for reconnecting to your ambition and to your intention? 

Just a quick check-in with all of these things can really help you stay on track with your focus, be more disciplined to work on the right things, and produce higher quality results in your day. 

I hope you get a great start to your week. 

To your success,  

Mandy Green 

P.S. If you want to see some other tools to use to help your focus, discipline, and planning, check out my new Busy Coach Performance Planner.