The enemy of success

Distraction. It's the enemy of success.

Lets face it, we live in a world of distractions. Every day, somebody invents a new gadget, website or app in an attempt to take our focus away from what we are supposed to be doing.

On an average day it is believed that an adult makes 35,000 decisions. If that happens in an eight hour day, that is almost 80 decisions per minute. So, spend two minutes on Facebook, and you are 160 decisions behind your game plan.

Sound crazy? It sure does. 

Contrast that to the life of our grandparents. How many daily decisions did they make? I spent two minutes trying to find the answer on the Internet, then made a decision that I needed to catch up on decision-making for the day, so I don’t have the tacit answer.

Outside of choosing what colour pants to wear and whether today was a shopping day or not, there may have been a few hundred decisions that our grandparents made every day.

Our brain is fascinating in the amount it can cope with, but the truth is that distraction is certainly the enemy of success.

Many of us like writing lists, but even our lists are too long because they have distracted tasks built in to them now. For instance, why do you have to check Facebook in the morning - since when did that get on to a task list?

A mentor recently suggested that we start using MITs. Most Important Tasks can be boiled down to three to five tasks that are critical. If you are not working in those areas, you are not working, you are distracted.

For Christmas, my MITs are:

Spend time with the family

XC ski daily

Eat less food than I normally do at Christmas

Read a book

Take time to be distracted

After all, it only lasts for a week or so.

Merry Christmas. . . .

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.