3 Tips to Make Best Use of Your Time and Reduce Stress.

Making the best use of time and managing stress – finding it difficult to focus?

The number of distractions in your day is directly proportional to the amount of time that you waste, and marketers, people, promises and other people’s agendas are all trying to grab your precious time.

When Facebook surveyed their users, a staggering 85% of them had the same response to the question “Why do you go to the  Facebook app?” – the answer was “ I don’t know”.  It becomes a habit and soon you are unconsciously choosing to open the app and browse your news feed for ‘interesting stories’.

As human beings when we are in a state of flow, really focused on a specific activity we are hard to distract. So why can’t we do that more often and with more of our day?

The simple answer is clarity of purpose. When we have clarity of purpose it is so much easier to put our focus and attention on the important things and avoid the distractions and shiny baubles the rest of the universe throws at you.

Clearing your head of the overwhelming amount of thoughts, problems and commitments that we can accumulate over time is vital as we can only focus on a certain number of active conversations at a time, and that varies for each person. This is not multitasking, that is a myth. No, this is having an awareness of an ongoing conversation and being able to return to it when required.

To get back control of your day and your time, the best starting point is creating a morning routine. Fifteen years ago this was considered geeky and a bit weird, but now virtually every business guru and leading entrepreneur claim that their success is in part due to their morning routine or ritual. I have a morning ritual that involves a simple process to set me up perfectly for each day. You can download the weekly and daily planning sheets here and I will send you three emails to guide you through using them.

But it is not just about planning, it is also about discipline and practice. When you combine discipline and practice intensely over a short period of time, often 30 days, you can create powerful new habits that will transform your personal productivity and focus.

Tips to improve your focus and make better use of your time so that you reduce stress.

1. Write down what the important tasks are that only you can do or you get the most joy and fulfilment out of.
2. Write down all of the other tasks you do in a week that are not in the first list.
3. As soon as possible identify someone in your organisation who can take the tasks in your second list off your hands and then focus on what only you can do and what brings you the greatest joy and fulfilment.

Barriers to improving focus and making better use of time to reduce stress

Programmes to reduce stress, improve focus and make better use of your time are popular and very prolific. The thing is many fail to deliver long-lasting results. This is because for any process to work it has to be YOUR process. You have to come up with it because you are far more likely to support a system you created yourself than a system off the shelf.

Because of the need to create your own systems, there is a sense of ‘it will take too much time’ or ‘it sounds like hard work’. You have to persevere to make any new way of working a repeatable behaviour so that it becomes a habit.