Focus for Effectiveness

I\’m sure you\’ve heard the saying: \”If you\’re going to do something do it properly or not at all\”?

Perhaps your parents said that to you as a child … or perhaps you say that to your own kids if you have children?

Wise advice

It\’s wise advice, but advice that\’s all too seldom heeded in a world full of distraction and false imperatives.

Just lately I\’ve been reminded, by a number of unrelated, communications related incidents, of just how relevant that advice is.

[box type=\”shadow\”]\”One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power.\”

– Anthony Robbins[/box]

The \’always on\’ world

I state the obvious but the world we live in today is very different from that of forty, or even twenty years ago.

Huge advances in technology combined with the advent of social media and real time instant messaging, that in most cases is either inexpensive or completely free, have resulted in what I like to call the \’always on\’ society of today.

Socially unacceptable to be incommunicado

The devices we use for communication are faster, smaller, more mobile and more affordable than ever before. As a consequence, it has become increasingly socially unacceptable to render yourself incommunicado for more than very short periods of time.

People in our \’always on\’ society are, somewhat understandably, becoming less and less intolerant of delays in communication. But the problem is that the perceived definition of \’delay\’ has narrowed from perhaps weeks or days to hours or even minutes!

Unfortunate side effects

Our need for instant gratification – as far as our communications is concerned – has brought with it some unfortunate side effects, most notably those caused by a lack of proper focus..

The ability to filter out that which is of lesser importance while focusing properly on the key issue at hand, is a rapidly receding skill.

Quantity or quality?

Its no wonder, really, when so many people seems to place more value on the process of initiating and responding to communications, rather than the actual quality of their communications.

Anyone who has been in the position of customer who has taken the trouble to meet with a service provider face-to-face and then have the attention to his or her issue distracted by another customer who chooses to phone in, will know what I mean!

Infinitely more worrying is the person who believes that responding to a call or text message is more important than focusing on the critical skill of driving – and there are plenty such folk around it would seem!

There are other less dangerous but more ubiquitous symptoms of the lack of focus that comes from our frantic efforts to keep abreast of all the communication we get.

eMail gripes

Take email communications for example. Here are a few of my pet gripes

• Important requests ignored

  How many times have you written an important multi-paragraph email only to find that any request or instruction beyond the first paragraph is either misunderstood or completely ignored by the recipient?

• Subject lines completely irrelevant

  In the rush to communicate people ignore the importance of a relevant subject line, sometimes leaving it out altogether (and wondering why the message ends up caught by the recipient\’s spam filter).

• No context offered

  People fail to provide proper context for their requests, leaving the recipient scratching his or her head.
  How many times have you had a LinkedIn or Facebook friend request from someone you\’ve never heard of and without the courtesy of an introduction? I just shake my head and ignore them.

• Disrespectful style

  Call me old fashioned but text language with the pigeon english  abbreviations and lazy use of lower case belongs between consenting friends, not in a serious communication with a third party.

A more upflifting note

At the risk of today\’s missive belonging more in a complaints forum than an inspiring blog, let me end on a more uplifting note.

In my opinion, you can, single handedly, and with relatively little effort, make a major contribution to our world, simply by bringing more focus to your life.

The 10-20-80 rule

Why not start with your communications and apply my 10-20-80 rule?

Simply resolve to allocate 10% of the time you currently spend communicating on deciding what is really important to you and what is not.

Then put 20% more effort into improving the quality of the important communications and allocate correspondingly less effort to other communications.

The result will be an 80% improvement in your effectiveness

Try it and see 🙂