Friend,
If you’re like me, you can easily get off-track due to distractions. Distractions are things that take away your full focus from the important task at hand. They are not relevant to your productivity, and prematurely redirect your effectiveness. There are many forms of distractions such as people, things, ideas, and situation’s. One minute we are on a roll with our tasks, and the next minute we have wondered off into something completely unrelated to what we were initially supposed to be doing. Even as I am writing this blog post, I am distracted by notifications and am tempted to stop what I’m doing to address them. Why does this happen?
DISCIPLINE
For some reason, we become convinced that the distractions are more interesting and end up focusing our attention there instead. We end up checking our notifications, scrolling through our social media feeds, and somehow we end up an hour or two encased in unproductivity. How Sway?! It all boils down to a lack of “discipline“. We aren’t disciplined enough to limit the time we feed to our distractions.
SETTING BOUNDARIES
The biggest issue I discovered with distractions was that we’re too accessible and lack boundaries. People have too much access to us. From the time we wake up in the morning, to the time we go to sleep at night, people are constantly trying to grasp our attention. We have to learn how to minimize and set limits on the access we give to the world.
This can be done by:
• Setting time limits of talk time,
• Using the do not disturb feature on your electronics
• Practicing unplugging by turning off your electronic devices, making them inaccessible, or setting them down for an extended period of time in order to refocus
• Re-prioritizing by letting go of distractions that are not relevant to your life
Now don’t get me wrong, we are very important people, and it is not necessary to take these actions to the extremes, but…… for the sake of productivity and inner peace, we should at least implement some strategies to better our standard of living. James 4:14 (NLT) says,
“How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone.”
So if life goes by so quickly, why waste so much time on things that don’t benefit us. We have a purposes to tend to, and if we don’t tend to them, then just as a weed overtakes an untended garden, so will distractions overtake our purposes. Friend, if you have a goal that you are trying to reach, you cannot get there as efficiently if you don’t settle down and focus. When we are consistently distracted, by the time we refocus, we are too drained to follow through with our original intent. This causes us to consistently put off our tasks until the next day. Tomorrow may never come if we allow this saga to continue. Friend, decide to make the choice today to regain your focus and stay on track. As my grandma Lillie used to say, “#YouGotThis”
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”