Free to Focus Success Path
Here’s a start-to-finish success path you can follow beginning right now:
- Clear the decks
- Carve out some margin so you can focus on implementing Free to Focus.
- Triage your calendar and make whatever arrangements you need to buy yourself some time.
- Set your baseline
- Use the Free to Focus Productivity Assessment to establish your baseline.
- Clarify your objective
- Get clear on your goal for productivity.
- Find true north
- Use the Task Filter and Freedom Compass to identify what’s working for you now and what’s not.
- Schedule margin
- Reserve mornings, evenings, and weekends for rejuvenation so you’ve got the mental and emotional energy to maximize your focus.
- Prune the overgrowth
- Create a Not-to-Do List using your Freedom Compass.
- Start eliminating everything you can from your calendar and task list.
- Stop thinking about it
- Establish rituals.
- Identify three necessary tasks or processes you can automate, starting right away.
- Offload everything you can
- Using the Delegation Hierarchy, start offloading tasks to other members of your team.
- The more time you spend in your Desire Zone, the greater the contribution you’ll make.
- Plan an Ideal Week
- The future is fuzzy. Give it some firm lines by establishing when you want to do what.
- Design your week and day
- Use the Weekly preview along with the Weekly and Daily Big 3 to keep track of your goals and key projects.
- Beat interruptions and distractions
- Follow the suggestions in Chapter 9, Activate.
Staying on Track
- Stop
- No one makes smart decisions in a frenzy of activity.
- Instead, press pause. Step away. Take a walk outside. Get a good night’s sleep.
- Do whatever it takes to clear your head. Then evaluate. Reflect on your true objectives.
- Consider any changes you need to make to your strategy in order to achieve it.
- Cut
- Odds are that you don’t just feel as if you have too much to do. You actually have too much to do.
- Use what you’ve learned to eliminate, automate, and delegate as many of these tasks as possible.
- Act
- Starting is half the battle, so identify the next steps that will give you a quick sense of momentum.
- The other half of the battle is staying focused.
