Managing Distractions

Managing Distractions: Introduction

Last week I wrote about journaling for mental health. I told a little of my journey with depression. I also showed how I was going to use Trello to start organising my to-do lists. Maybe I should have talked about managing distractions, because this week has been jammed full of those.

There are a few triggers that have got me going this week – some good and some not so good.

1. A Facebook friend, Sharon Jurd, runs a Facebook Group called Amazing Speakers and Coaches. She suggested we post the 3 things we were going to achieve this week. Great says he – write it down and commit. I wrote.
   1. Launch my charity cycle ride to my list. 2. Create bonus offer for my main offers. 3. Prepare stage 1 for co-branded book launch
2. Another friend posted a comment on LinkedIn where I had shared my Mental Health blog post. She says “Pity it is not about your story”. That set me back a bit as I felt I had told a fair bit of my story – and it was about my story – nobody else’s. Maybe I could write a whole lot more BUT who is interested in the details of my story? Who wants to know about a middle aged man and his suicide contract with his counesllor, etc? After all, I did pull out the lessons I had learned that helped me to stay alive – that is more helpful to the reader in my view. That got me stewing around about what to write in this week’s new blog post – I had a theme in mind BUT maybe there is mileage in pushing the story a bit further.
3. The third Friday of every month is options expiry time in investing markets. That is a busy time for me as I account for and write up all the trades. This one was busier because there were a lot of stocks assigned on income trades after a strong 4 week trading period. So I got busy doing that – and then there was a massive collapse in Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrency) markets. One of my accounts was hit with margin calls and a major forced selling of positions = booking some very large losses. I hate taking losses, especially from factors outside my control. One of the reasons I am pursuing the Internet Marketing stuff is to make my finances a little more independent of stock market returns. It would be great if I could point to some massive wins in this department. I look at the traffic numbers – stuff is ticking along BUT there are no fireworks yet.

Riding for Charity

Item 1 on my list is to do with my charity bicycle ride. I ride once a year for a Kids Cancer Charity. The ride covers the month of October. I like to set up a long distance challenge – October is next week. I did make progress in the week. I did book tickets and accommodation to travel up to the Gold Coast for the October long weekend with my wife. The plan is then to travel up to Rockhampton, further up the Queensland coast and cycle back to Gold Coast. That then closes the circle for my trips around Australia – it is the only leg of a circumnavigation of Australia I have not ridden. So my head has started to fill with the details of planning for that – I do not have to be a big planner as I have done so many of these before – but there are things to be done. I do most of the fund raising by email – that is easy enough as I have a list I use. Just need to dedicate 2 hours or so to tidy up the list – I know how to do that so it is easy to procrastinate.

[Note: I did push to do that well after midnight on Friday night. I updated new contracts from LinkedIn and sent the first email out. It got donations. Here is the latest update from my page. Click the image to donate]

Two for One and Small Wins

Now what I learn as I write this stuff down is that journaling would have been very helpful.  For me, the hard part is finding the time to dedicate to writing it out.

I also wrote last week about using small wins as a way to break through depression. I have been doing that this week again. My trip up the coast is going to take me away from home for the whole month of October. There are a bunch of tasks that need doing around here.

The other technique I like to use is what I call “two for the price of one“. Good example coming up to do with watering my front lawn. We have a couple of rainwater tanks in the back garden. I have set up pumps for them, some time back. The front garden is 3 hose pipe lengths away from the back garden. I did buy connectors last weekend when we were away. I know the pumps can lift the water the required one metre to get to the front garden. I have not washed my car for some months now – it is an embarrassment. The two for one task was to set up the rainwater-fed hosepipe and wash my car. Now I am set to be able to water the front lawn before I go away. Nice story but what it really was, was a distraction from progressing my Internet Marketing activity or progressing my bicycle trip.

Managing Distractions and Shiny Objects

Managing Distractions is central to my life. I suspect it is for all of us. It is worse for me because I have a head full of ideas. My wife is always telling me that I should run an Ideas Business – let someone else do the implementing. Just help people to generate ideas. There is merit in that thinking. I mentioned the Use PLR, Rachel Youngson, lady last week – well she was promoting her “How to build a membership” PLR product. I very nearly bought it as I know full well the value of a good membership site as a source of recurring income. People tend to stay in a membership for about 18 months = nice income once you have got the conversion. I know I have been in a few memberships for years even though I have not really used them. I did resist the temptation to grab the shiny object as that would be another project that would become a distraction. Don’t get me wrong, I will do one. I have lots of material to put in a site – 7 or 8 years of PLR for one. I have a platform that has membership built in. I have some really neat training materials that I can offer on WordPress and stuff like that.

10 Steps for Managing Distractions

So what this post is all about managing distractions. I found these 10 tips from Lolly Daskal. She is a well known blogger. I will borrow some of her headings and quotes (in quotation marks) and write my side of the story.

1.  Check up on yourself.
   “If you’re all over the place, ask yourself what’s really going on.” Write it down in a journal. Set some goals. Get some specific focus. I am better at focus part compared to the other two. I have never really set goals = beginning to learn this is a mistake.
2. Pinpoint the cause.
   “Once you have your internal priorities sorted out, look at other causes, internal or external. Get away from them or fix them.” Examples: skills, tools, environment, other people, noise
3.  Be prepared.
   “All successful leaders are great planners; they make lists for every major and minor objective.” Build to-do lists just like I wrote last week. The more top down they are the better they work – remember the sequence
   Strategy => Plan => To-Do list
4. Go offline.
   “If you want real focus, take yourself offline until you’ve accomplished what you need to do.” I have started reducing time on social media. It is a tough discipline when all your work is in front a computer. Turn off the notifications and close browser tabs is what I do.
5. Give yourself a break.
   “When you start to feel distracted, take a break, and then reassess and refocus yourself.” Well, well. I find it is so easy to take a break = a distraction. Doing the 2nd part of the suggestion is actually the important piece especially if you write down the to-dos that came out of the reassessment.  Use the break to think about what is not working and fix it.
6. Tune it out.
   “One of the best ways to tune everything out is to tune in to music. ” This does not work for me BUT I can see it working in a busy office space. I just start listening to the music = more of a distraction than a help.
7. Break it down.
   “Make tasks smaller and break down your large projects into smaller tasks to help you concentrate and give you a sense of accomplishment and progress.” Robert Plank wrote a great book about getting stuff done. He sets himself 4 tasks a day – one for 10 minutes and 3 for 40 minutes each. He chunks everything down to that size. When you get good at that you can be done my lunch time and could even do another cycle before dinner. I like 15 minutes and 45 minutes because the brain remaps itself every 45 minutes.
8. Clean it up.
   “What’s the state of your office or workspace? If it’s disorganised, or cluttered, spend some time in clearing it out so you can focus.” My workspace is a shambles. I do however know where everything is – that is my excuse. Somehow the other things that need doing get priority. Only time it gets cleared up is when I do tax returns = need a clear office to do that.
9. Set a deadline.
   “If you’re working on a complex task, set a deadline.” Lolly talks about 90 minutes as being a good number to break a complex task. Use the Robert Plank technique – two 45 minute tasks will crunch most complex tasks. Break them into chunks – set a timer – go and do till done.
10. Become an early bird.
    “Start your workday an hour before everyone else. Use that hour to organise your day and to get started before there are any distractions”. When I was working I did this all the time. Trains were less crowded. Office was quiet. I also used the hour at the other end after everyone had gone. Now it is tough – most of my investing activity happens late at night when US markets are open. I cannot cope with the early start after those late night sessions. But I do push myself to get up and moving before my wife goes to work.

Using Trello for Managing Distractions

Now my Trello Board work from last week adds in another core idea all about how to bring in new ideas and new projects – so they do not become distractions. It is related to the Be Prepared point that Lolly covers above and borrows from Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape. I am using it in a modified way – I have 4 buckets of activity

1. Routine Tasks – Daily
2. Routine Tasks – Periodic
3.  New Projects Tasks
4.  New Ideas to Think About

When one of those distraction ideas comes along I categorise it into a list rather than doing it straight away (well I did get better at that this week). The image below is a snapshot of my boards as they stand.

The ticks and ringed items are the things that I did – big problem is in getting traction on the routine tasks.

• I did do a little Twitter engagement stuff – what I need to pin down is what the specific steps are going to be for organic traffic and do them each day.
• I made the most progress on getting copywriting materials out to my lists. I was pleased with that as I got much better response rates than I had been getting (40 to 50 each email rather than the 5 or 6).
• I did do three GSM solo ads – those are getting traffic but very low conversions. Co-branded book launch is moving ahead – I kept up with some of the tasks – got one really outstanding – setting up the customer autoresponder series.
• And I did some two for one tasks on the bonus offers – using the copywriting materials – still got some way to go.
• I did add two new ideas to think about – one for linking WordPress blog posts (like this one) to Steemit (which I use for investing) and one for membership site.

Focused on Managing Distractions for next Week

What I do know is my week was one where I was not very good at managing distractions. This next week will not be much better as I have a bike ride to get organised for. Things are progressing there. New clothes arrived today, bicycle is in for service, bookings are made, some tyre things to sort out, gear is easy as I have lists for that. So I will need to be super focused on getting some Internet Marketing stuff done.  The real priority is to get ready for the co-branded book launch with the bonus offer of coywriting material set up. I have not thought too much about how I will do it on the road from Thursday – packing a small computer to do that stuff is step one. Making sure I can access files is the key bit of planning. Most stuff runs in the cloud so it is a little easier.

Resources

Charity Fund Raising: I made a video about how I raised over $17,000 over 8 cycling campaigns using Internet Marketing techniques.  Grab that here

Project Management: I use Trello as a project management tool to document all my work steps. That will provide a toolbox for managing projects and also for managing an outsourcer down the line – try it for free

Journaling Tips Grab your copy of the journaling PLR here – it’s a free resource.