Productivity For Dummies

Chapter 7

Learning to Focus

In This Chapter

Learning to focus on the right things

Discovering what disturbs your focus

Realising what it takes to stay focused

The ability to focus on the right thing at the right time is a skill too few people have conquered. Master this skill and you’ll achieve more than you ever thought possible. Removing the mass of distractions of everyday life is challenging, but it is achievable. In this chapter, you discover what stands in your way and find out how you can minimise the distractions of life and get more done.

Identifying Your Focus

So little time, so much to do. How do you decide what to focus your attention on? What merits your attention, and what deserves to be dropped? Understanding priorities is a challenge for a lot of folks. Distinguishing what you like to do from what you ought to do can be a test in itself before the work has even begun.

The Pareto Principle

In the early 1900s, an Italian economist by the name of Alfredo Pareto observed that 20 per cent of Italy’s population held 80 per cent of the wealth. Intrigued by this discovery, he took a look at other economies and found similar distributions of wealth.

In the 1960s, a quality ...