To Be Successful – Hang Up and Drive

Hang Up and Drive

As reported by the Harvard Business Review, according to a recent study by the Virginia Transportation Institute:

In 80% of crashes the driver was distracted during the three seconds preceding the incident. In other words, they lost focus — dialed their cell phones, changed the station on the radio, took a bite of a sandwich, maybe checked a text — and didn’t notice that something changed in the world around them. Then they crashed.

In our increasingly congested world; a world filled with emails, marketing messages and myriad demands on our time; we are also in danger of crashing, but the potential victim in this instance is our business.  The Harvard Business Review put it this way:

The world is changing fast and if we don’t stay focused on the road ahead, resisting the distractions that, while tempting, are, well, distracting, then we increase the chances of a crash.

Focus or Fail

There are countless reasons for business failure, but the most often overlooked is focus.  Today’s business environment is more like the Grand Prix than a Sunday drive, and with information rushing toward us at breakneck speed, focus is essential.  If you cannot prioritize effectively, focusing on what is most important to the life or your business and dismissing the rest, you will have invited a collision with failure.

Peter Bregman, writing for the Harvard Business Review, makes an interesting suggestion:  Make two lists.

List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead)

What are you trying to achieve? What makes you happy? What’s important to you? Design your time around those things. Because time is your one limited resource and no matter how hard you try you can’t work 25/8.

List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions)

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn’t make you happy? What’s not important to you? What gets in the way?

Some people already have the first list. Very few have the second. But given how easily we get distracted and how many distractions we have these days, the second is more important than ever.

Remain Engaged & Notice Change

In today’s social media environment. remaining engaged with your surroundings and your followers is crucial to your success.  Know what’s important.  Know whose attention is vital to your mission and cultivate it.  Change will be seismic, don’t miss it when it occurs.