Our lives are filled with unnecessary junk paired with distractions stopping us from accomplishing anything. Remaining focused is difficult if we don’t acknowledge our day-to-day actions. Instead of living in the moment, our thoughts are racing, and we’re unable to keep up. Leading to unproductive days and any results we’re hoping for continue to prolong.
I used to be subject to procrastination, not your typical procrastination where you’re idling. It’s time-wasting masked as productivity; the steps required toward your goal are rendered useless. You’re occupying yourself with futile actions, placing an unintentional pause on accomplishing the ultimate goal.
Allow me to provide you with a real-life example. In 2020 I decided to pursue a career in marketing by creating my own marketing agency. Despite the motivation, I didn’t do anything substantial until 2022. Instead, I looked for the most efficient ways of outreach (finding clients), best marketing hacks, and how to close clients (make sales). It’s ironic because I was worried about wasting time and committing mistakes when I ended up wasting time anyway. By trying to perfect everything before starting, I never propelled forward as a marketer. If I would have taken the leap of faith, then maybe I might have learned along the way. The best way of learning is through experience, you can only learn so much by reading. If I had stopped worrying about the future and worrying about clients I didn’t even have, I may have generated greater progress than now.
We are so fixated on results we never make the move to achieve results. Here are 3 tips that will change your life for the better.
Enjoying the journey
Goal setting should be practised among society to enable individual growth. Setting objectives allows people to know where efforts would be best spent. Unfortunately, most of us forget to enjoy the hard work phase and wish to skip to the end. If the road to glory cannot be savoured and cherished, how can we feel satisfaction and contentment at the time of achievement?
Stop thinking about the end
I know, it’s easier said than done right? We are eager to grab the prize but don’t think about the consequences. Yes, there are always consequences.
I’d like you to reminisce about your school days for a moment. The simple period of life when all we would do is essentially enjoy ourselves. Yet, when we reach secondary school, we couldn’t wait for the day to end. As we proceed further into education, we wish for days to fly by. Only to regret our wishes years later. It’s a sad reality how fallible we truly are and by the time we realise, it’s too late.
If we are constantly reminding ourselves about the end goal, then we can only blame ourselves. Let us not fall into the same mistake with life after education.
Remove distractions
Remove any possible distractions and place them as far away as possible. The majority of factors in our lives are a distraction and we refuse to change. We fall into the delusion of thinking what we’re doing is productive, while time continues to tick, and valuable moments are lost. Time is a precious asset corrupted by distraction.
Staying present will become harder as we continue to evolve as human beings. Our attention span is decreasing at the same rate as our productiveness. Enjoy the little moments, pause, and focus on your breathing for a few minutes. When was the last time you felt tranquillity? I challenge you to think and relax the next time you’re in your state of work. Think about what you want at that moment and if what you’re doing is relevant. I’ll end the blog with this - Time does not dictate your actions and neither does your surroundings, so focus on the now and not the latter.