As promised yesterday, I am committing myself for the next month or two to doing a daily blog post. And sending it out pretty much first draft. My goal is to record what I’ve learned each day. I want a record of what worked and didn’t work…hopefully I’ll take that information, internalize it, and make behavioural adjustments accordingly. That’s my ideal idea. But still recording my thoughts and just writing is good for my thinking, right?

Ok, so yesterday. My number one thing I did yesterday was to prioritize my work, and finish a task before moving on to a new one. There were a lot of videos that needed to be downloaded to our shared drive so our LMS administrator could do with them as needed. At first I just piddled around and did some here, then worked on something else, came back, worked on something else, etc. But after a while, I realized that nothing was getting done.

At that moment, I committed myself to finishing the task of downloading the videos before doing anything else. And you know what? It ended up taking me a grand total of 15 minutes. I turned off email, Twitter, and my ears (ok, I put in my headphones and listed to my “dance” playlist). I was shocked at how quickly I could get through something when it is my sole focus.

So that is my lesson learned for 3/27/2012: Single Focus.

I know I have to multi-task and that I won’t always be able to finish something before starting something new. However, I learned that I am much much much more speedy when I focus on a single item rather than multiple ones.

Now that it’s Thursday, I’m going to implement Single Focus. I have prioritized my to-do list, and I will start working through it.

Tangential Thought – Priorities:

Priorities are a tricky subject, aren’t they? I mean, we are always talking about priortizing things, the priorities in our lives, “Priority #1″…the list can go on and on. But the problem most of us have with priorities is the question “What criteria do I use to prioritize?”

Although I won’t presume to tell you HOW to set your priorities, I assert that you should always have a clear understanding of WHAT your priorities are. For me, my priorities are based on understanding myself and how I like to work. I’m goal-oriented, which means that I prioritize according to what I can accomplish and cross off.

Top of my to-do list? Always the easiest and quickest thing to accomplish! For difficult and more complex tasks I break it down into easy to achieve pieces. And by easy-to-achieve I mean things that are realistically able to be completed.

Ok, so that’s it. Yesterday was about single focus and inherently priorities. Let’s see what I learn today!

PS: Please pardon any grammar errors or incomplete thoughts. As I said, I’m publishing these without significant revisions. What you read is exactly how my mind works. Oddly enough, I think in paragraphs. Weird, huh?