With constant growth in customers expectation in term of quality, cost and delivery, you can’t focus on all areas of a project. You have to choose what is critical and what is trivial.
In 1906, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto created a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, observing that twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth.
“Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” — Herbert Simon
Most of us, knowledge workers, have to deal with HUGE amount of information each day. E-mails, RSS Feeds, Twits, etc… Too much information, especially badly handled, cause a lost of attention and focus.
In this blog post, I’ll share with you some ways to handle one of the biggest flow of information : RSS Feeds (I’ve already talked about e-mails in an earlier series of post : Inbox Zero).
Last couple of weeks, I’ve been facing a big procrastination period. I was unable to get real things done and to focus efficiently on tasks.
I fact, I wasn’t trusting my system anymore. I wasn’t using my task management app anymore and was spreading my notes and lists in too many places.
So I decided to take some time (2 full days exactly) to review my processes and my workflow and to evaluate each tool I was using.
There’re so many available distractions for people like me, working almost all day in front of a computer with an internet access, that sometimes it can be totally impossible to work. You feel overwhelmed by all these disturbances. I can list a few for you : e-mails, micro-blogging, RSS feeds, social networks, forums, instant-messaging, online activity, endless surfing session (lost in the “open in new tab” loop) and so on.
First of all, don’t feel bad about it, it happens to everybody. It’s just in the human being DNA (at least, I guess it is).
Last Monday afternoon I’ve faced a pure moment of procrastination. It was impossible for me to work more than one hour. And even during this hour I wasn’t really productive and finished the day in low energy mode.
I feel the need to analyze the reasons of this because I really thought that I had prepared this new week rightly :
Weekly review was done last Friday : weekly reviews are useful to take a look at what was done previous week, to check tasks and to prepare next week
Sometimes it’s really hard to concentrate, and the temptation of procrastination is strong, really strong. Maybe it’s because you are tired (child wakes up during the night), or too much stressed about your work or something personal. So you surf the internet, get lost in twitter, check for new e-mails each minute (even reading Nigerian’s scam e-mails), chat with friends and update your facebook/linkedIn account.
In such case, you have 2 choices, give up or refocus. Second one is by far the best option if you don’t want the situation getting worse and worse.
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