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One of life’s big challenges is focusing your energy without letting anything important fall through the cracks. Here are some helpful tips to help you stay out of the sand traps of life:

Write things down.

Unless you’re among the 2% or so of people who can carry every detail in their heads without fail, develop a simple system to capture the date of your next committee meeting, the mechanic’s estimate for your engine rebuild, or nifty tool your brother-in-law can’t live without. Take a look at our Tips and Tools page for some handy ways to keep track of details.

Turn off the radio.

After you check the traffic and weather, snap off the radio for the rest of your drive to work. Think about the day ahead. Call to mind the things that are important — both tasks that need to be accomplished and the kind of person you want to be during your day. Have you read or heard something lately that inspired you? Call it to mind. Do you have a particularly sticky problem on the horizon? This can be a good time to sit with it and let your mind be creative.

Know Your Style

Do you like silent seclusion in order to focus? Or do you do your best work collaboratively? Be proactive about providing yourself the kind of environment that helps you function at a high level. Is your work environment the exact opposite of what you need? Be creative. Look for ways to carve yourself a niche, or keep an eye out for other similarly collaborative folks and find a conference room with a whiteboard for brainstorming.

Know Your Strengths

According to research by the Gallup Organization, one of the elements of engaging and effective work is doing what you do best every day. But many of us don’t have a clear idea of what our strengths are. A good starting point is the Signature Strengths inventory available at AuthenticHappiness.com (free registration required).

Use Your Strengths

Once you are aware of your innate strengths (not, by the way, to be confused with training or skills), you need to employ them. Sometimes, though, it’s not clear how our strengths can be applied to the challenges we face. For instance, perhaps Rebecca, a rather shy software developer, is called upon to make connections with other key departments and persuade them to share information vital to completing an important project. How can she use her tendencies to be detail-oriented and methodical to good advantage?

A naturally reserved person is often uncomfortable in interactions that have to be improvised on the fly. So Rebecca’s strengths can be called upon in her preparation. Her analytical talent-set will come in handy to develop reasons that an ongoing collaboration might be beneficial to the other departments. Development of a clear explanation of the value of the project to the entire organization, a precise description of what is required, and anticipation of possible objections will increase the likelihood of a prompt and positive response.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.