Have you ever had a day where, although you stayed busy, you ended the day feeling like you didn’t get anything done? Each day, we are presented with a lot of choices of what we want to do and accomplish, but we have limited time to do them all.

We are a lot more distracted today than we have ever been before in the past. Tools like Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media all demand little bits of our attention, which add up quickly through the course of a day.

It is also a lot easier for people to interrupt you now, than it has been in the past. In addition to email, there are now lots of free instant messaging apps that make it even easier for people to contact you.

Browsers (even mobile ones) all have tabs, allowing us to switch back and forth between multiple websites with ease.

The end result is that it’s very easy to spend a lot of time doing a lot of small things, without getting anything important accomplished.

So how do we stay focused?

 

Start at the beginning of each week (or plan ahead at the end of the week) and make a list of all the goals you expect to accomplish that week. Then split up these goals into a list of tasks that need to be accomplished each day of the week, in order to hit the weekly goal.

As you complete tasks, check them off. It is a very satisfying feeling of accomplishment to check off tasks that are completed, as you can now feel real progress being made. There are many free task management programs available to help you do so. Teux Deux is a popular web-based one to get you started.

Keeping a system like this allows you to track how much progress you want to make in the next one month – three months and six months, and then split that up into manageable chunks, so that each day you have something meaningful to do.

You can now go home feeling much better, knowing that you are one day closer to reaching your goals.