There are fewer secrets with so many methods available online. However, what is usually secret is not the tool itself, but the implementation and connections.
Everybody wants to be more productive not just merely busy.
Productivity starts with your tools, self-awareness and making a decision to be more productive than you were before.
Why are we not productive most of the time?
Because we lose focus. Statistics are even more worrying – “On average, it takes about 24 minutes to regain your focus once it has been lost.”
Distractions are hunting as everywhere. For digital nomads and people working from home, they become killers of success. Phone, TV, sounds around us, email, Youtube, Facebook…
A survey by CareerBuilder showed that nearly 20 percent of bosses believe workers put in less than 5 hours a day of actual work. What do employees themselves say about distractions in office?
How much do distractions cost you per month?
Have you ever counted how much do you lose money, because of the distraction every day? It is scary. Truly is. It is more frightening when your hours cost more, and when you are distracted more times per day.
How to focus living in this reality full of distractions?
Red Cappi team was hunting for a tool that would make our customers and followers happy and get them on track with their projects and email marketing efforts. After some web research, we found a Focuster and we were actually impressed.
Focuster is a tool that gives you the opportunity to be self-aware of your priorities.
You can never lose focus because it reschedules your tasks.
When we tried using Focuster, we found it gave us a calming effect on our minds that we won’t forget to reschedule. Moreover, once you start using such app, you realize how much time do you have in your day.
Focuster is so smart that it can even create tasks for you that you might hesitate to put on other task listing apps. For example, if you keep re-reading one email it will set it as a task to complete. This synchronization is enabled through Zapier.
Because of Zapier, Focuster is successfully integrated with your other favorite apps such as Evernote, Todoist, and Slack.
That makes it easy to integrate productivity and prioritize for all team. You will not be losing focus and forget your priorities because Focuster will ensure that all of your projects – group related, personal and creative projects are all assigned to the to-do list and prioritized.
You can watch Focuster in action in this video, and it will demonstrate you how to schedule your day and how to use it in your browser to get reminders.
Quit Over-Planning, Over Talking and Over Thinking
The above will help you to prioritize and stay focused, but what about taking action itself at all?
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. – Walt Disney
What are the warning signs that you are over planning?
If you get frightened over future and think that your plans can turn out differently, this means that you are often stuck just in planning mode. Jennifer Aniston once wisely said, “…do not make plans, make options.” It is better to have several options, then keep planning and adding points in your journey without actually getting into the car. If you obsess over minor details and call it a perfectionism, then you are in big trouble. You are actually at a risk of not achieving anything in your life. Does any project require planning for 5 years ahead if you are not going to start indeed anything that is listed because you will be scared of the first step?
Overplanning can ruin your life. You might be a genius with excellent skills, who praises planning itself, but if you want to achieve it – you have to do it and build it.
Finally, give yourself 15 min of planning daily.
Not more. Your ideas are not tested on how successful they are – they can be changed along the journey that you finally decide to take. If you are building a business, you have to expect unexpected. Otherwise, you will be ruined in the first week of action. Unexpected interruptions are what happens in everybody’s lives, and that’s what makes journeys amazing and worth writing books about.
It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. – Albert Einstein
Red Cappi has created email marketing tool that you can use for many goals across sectors and channels. Today we hope that you will to lose fewer hours of distractions and achieve your dreams!