The hustle and bustle of life are what causes everyone to be busy. You need to start to hate the word busy. Being busy is a sign that your priorities are not in the right order. When you know what's important, its easier to say no, it becomes easier to stay focused because you are crystal clear about what you need and want. There is a big difference between doing the most important work and doing whatever keeps you busy at the moment. Executing on this difference is how you increase productivity.
Busy work is the stuff you do that takes time. It makes you feel like you are working hard, but it does not move you forward the most. To avoid the hustle and bustle of life, ask yourself this question. What is the task that if you get it done, will make the most significant impact? Always go back to this question each day, week, and month. It will help you to refocus on what matters.
To avoid the hustle and bustle of life, ask yourself this question. What is the task that if you get it done, will make the most significant impact? Always go back to this question each day, week, and month. It will help you to refocus on what matters.
Stay Focused and Forget The Hustle and Bustle
Hard work is not the key to success. It's part of the recipe but not the whole thing. There are plenty of people who show up to work every day and work their tails off. They will do so for the next 15 years and may not experience any considerable jump in success. People come after them and work half as hard as them, get more recognition and bring home quadruple the paycheck.
Before you start with the hustle and bustle, it's vital that you figure out what areas need your focus. Focus is a valuable currency in our world today. Everything is fighting for your attention from the latest app, to the newest movie on Netflix. It all is saying, please look at me, and they will make you happy.
Focus is the ability to block all of that crap and center back on the focusing question. What is the task that if you get it done, will make the most significant impact? Then do that work. You should always be asking the questions after getting things done if you don't, you lose focus and do work today that could have been done next week.
The Most Important Work is Not Always Obvious
The biggest challenge with the hustle and bustle of life is that you may have to do work that appears not to be that important to outsiders. Like Warren Buffet famously said, you to sell when everyone is buying and buy when everyone is selling.
The apparent work may be to get on the phone and try and make more sales calls and grind it out. The most important work may be taking a step back and coming up with a better strategy. If you can improve the approach, you can help the entire sales team sell more, while improving the morale of the organization.
It takes courage to do the most critical work. The reason it takes courage is that you will have times when you feel or look like you are not working. It's more comfortable to sit at your computer and fire off emails than it is easy to take 20 minutes and think. Its easier to do work that looks busy than it is to sharpen the saw.
Sharpening The Saw Make This All Easier
You could spend 8 hours cutting down a tree, or you can spend an hour sharpening the saw and knock the tree down in an hour. Most people would rather wack at the tree for 8 hours because it gets your hustle and bustle brownie points.
The smarter move is to work at finding the essential task. Every task has a way you could be sharpening the saw. For example, when I was developing the Habit Stacker app. We went months with one of our developers not having an iPhone. She had an android, and it caused little problems in development because she could not always see what she was creating.
I tried working on the communication issue and fixing all of the other problems. None of it mattered. The sharpening the saw task to avoid the hustle and bustle was to get her an iPhone. Once I got her an iPhone, our development time decreased, and we had much fewer communication issues.
Say No To Get Out of the Hustle and Bustle and Increase Your Productivity
When you have no focus, you tend to say yes to everything. The reason you feel overwhelmed and stressed is that you love to say yes too much. Everyone that needs your help you give them a yes and smile. Five minutes later you are crying in the corner wishing that you said no.
The antidote for this is saying no more. It's way better to say no, think about it and come back later and say yes rather than just rushing a yes to please everyone — every time you say yes to something you have to say no to something else. There are only 24 hours a day so you can only do so much in a day. You have to choose what is important to you.
How to Stay Focused on Your Habits
Habit Stacker provides resources to help you improve your habits. The first way we do this is through our online course Habit Mastery. The second way is with the Habit Stacker mobile app.
Olympian and founder of Habit Stacker Ian Warner, teaches the Habit Mastery course. He walks you through practical techniques that you can use to improve your life through your habits. No fluff or non-sense! You get instant access to over 45 different videos breaking down how to build good habits and break bad ones.
The Habit Stacker app is what you use to live out your habits from day today. It's a habit tracker that lets you know what you need to do each day. The app sets your daily routine board for you each day, so you all you have to do is get the task done at the top of the list. You can look back and see your streaks for each habit. You can know you are increasing your productivity based on the habits you track.