Focus on One Thing?

Last month, I wrote about baby steps and working steadily towards a goal. This month, I've decided to talk about the problem of concentration and distraction. We're always told (from childhood on) to concentrate on one thing at a time. AND IT'S GREAT ADVICE!

The problem is that we are living creatures with several different areas of interest and responsibilities to manage at any given moment.

We get bored. And distracted.

We get Shiny Object Syndrome. We have microscopic attention spans.

So, before I get too far along, I think we should define the proverbial "one thing".

Your life is the "one thing". If you try to think of your own existence as your most important project, you will begin to see health, contentedness, and results from your hard work.

What is time?

Time is a container.

Our resources are limited. One minute is 60 seconds. One hour is 60 minutes. One day is 24 hours. No more; no less.

These are the "spaces" where life takes place.

For the most part, we get to decide what happens in these spaces. You may have a day job or babysitting duties, and you accept these constraints, but you plan the time you devote to your website.

A Four-room House

I'll share this story that I heard somewhere as an analogy: our lives are like a house with four rooms (which might be overly simplistic because my life/house appears to have several storeys as well).

But let's go with the "four rooms" version for the moment.

These "rooms" would define your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual areas. The story says that you need to at least open the windows in each of these rooms every day to stay healthy and be a balanced human being.

What does this look like? Here are my ideas. I hope you'll share yours in the comments.

Tangible, Physical, Visible

Taking care of your physical "room" can mean exercising and eating right, cleaning your house, and setting up an efficient office area so that you can run your business more comfortably. I think it also includes practical aspects related to relationships, scheduling, and anything that could be defined as tangible, like hunger, thirst, and fatigue.

In the business realm, the physical includes building your website and searching for affiliate programs to join, which are your points of contact with the world.

Think, Dream, Create

Taking care of your mental space would concern your thinking skills like analytical skills, planning, scheduling, and critical thinking. Remember that the mind and the emotions are separate rooms in this house so we need to be able to distinguish the "I feel" ideas from the "I think" ideas. Rational aspects are included in the mental space, like logic, keyword research, fact-checking, and website design.

The mental aspect of business means planning, organization, strategy, and decision-making.

Feelings, Ethos, Sensitivity

Taking care of your emotional space would involve getting in touch with your feelings. Humans experience a range of emotions like sadness, happiness, anger, despair, loneliness, frustration, and contentment. Emotions are not "rational" but they are normally appropriate and in context with what is going on at the moment.

However, pay attention if anything causes you to overreact because it could be a sign of a problem. If you look at your website stats and suddenly want to delete your site, do not trust your feelings!

I think that the emotional component of your personality can be put to good use in a business context when you write content and think about promotions. We all know that people buy for emotional reasons and then rationalize their behavior with logic.

Intuition, Values, Perception

Lastly, taking care of your spiritual space would mean paying attention to your beliefs, perception, and intuition. You can do this in several radically different ways, such as meditation, prayer, hiking in the mountains, mindfulness, or listening to inspiring music. Explore your hunches - those crazy ideas that you know would work.

The human spirit is different from the mind and the emotions: it lies somewhere in the middle and also connects us to other people, the environment, and aspects of life and the world that are bigger than we are, so to speak. This is a hard topic because so many people associate spirituality with religion, but the concept is much broader. I think your spirit is who you are.

In a business context, I would apply this concept to mission and vision building, which fits into the sphere of management. Trust and reputation also have a connotation that goes deeper than mere emotional or mental recognition, and these concepts are vitally important in business.

One Example

Over the past month, I've started and finished several translation projects, I have begun teaching regularly on Mondays and Fridays, and I finished a college class. My writing has taken a direct hit, and I felt disappointed with myself. So here's my example of the application of this hypothesis:

I've had to rearrange my job and website (physical) within my schedule (time) and manage my feelings (emotional). That rationalization (mental) and my own prayer habit (spiritual) makes me feel more in control.

I hope I've said something useful. Let me know what you think and keep on writing!