One of my clients came to a coaching session with his mind swirling from a hectic day. With so many thoughts fighting for his attention, he struggled to put together even a single complete sentence.
The simple exercise I shared with him is one that you may find helpful for yourself or one of your colleagues when you urgently need to focus after your day has been blindsided.
It’s a different application of a strategy from David Allen’s classic work, Getting Things Done.
Your brain won’t focus because it still feels responsible to juggle all of the balls it has been handling. In Getting Things Done, those are the macro, project-level issues, tasks, and messages. His solution is to have a single trusted inbox and calendar to hold all of your work so your brain can be free to operate as working space for whatever task is at hand.
But in a chaotic day, when you’ve been bombarded with what I call “drive-by” conversations, where people verbally load you up with what might be responsibilities, forcing everything into a rigid inbox system may feel unachievable.
When you need to do focused work, but your mind is swirling from those drive-by conversations, a piece of paper, a pen, and a timer can be your best friends.
Once you’ve physically isolated yourself somewhere that will allow you to focus, set a timer for five minutes. Use that time to write down a simple bullet list of all of the thoughts that are vying for your attention. Every time you capture a thought on paper, you release your brain from the responsibility of remembering it.
With about twenty seconds to spare on the five-minute timer, my client looked up and announced that his mind was fresh, and he was ready to focus. It ended up being one of the most productive and insightful conversations that we’ve had so far.
So next time you find yourself with chaos on the brain, try a five-minute timed exercise to get that chaos on paper. You’ll be surprised at how much better you can focus.
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