Ep 25: Why You Feel Overwhelmed and Can’t Make Progress

You don't actually have too much to do. It just feels like you do because your attention is split in a million different directions, thinking about what you should be doing, what you didn't finish, what might go wrong, what's coming next. And when your attention is scattered like that, this subtle little thing happens. You can't really fully show up to anything. So everything feels a lot harder than it should. Progress feels slow. Your mind is constantly busy and occupied, and you start calling that stress responsibility. I'm just being responsible for this. I have to figure this out. I have to worry about that. But most of that stress, it's not coming from the amount of work, it's coming from the lack of focus. Welcome back to the Built for Impact podcast. My name is Jake Burhans and this is the podcast where inner peace meets high performance. And where building your dream life starts from the inside out. Today we're going to be talking about something pretty simple, but honestly one of the biggest reasons I believe that people feel constantly stressed and stuck, and that is focus, right? It's not talking about like some productivity hacks or systems or anything like that, but just your ability— very simple— your ability to put your full attention on one thing at a time. I know in this day and age, you know, we're like squirrels out there. Our attention's here, it's there, social media, flashing lights, dopamine. It's all these things. And our ability to focus and pay attention, I think, has diminished significantly. It must have diminished significantly over the past 20 years, right, in this age of the internet and all these things. So I want to walk you through why that happens and how shifting this is going to change your entire internal experience of, of work and life. So the first thing here is that stress often comes from this like fragmented attention, not necessarily your workload, right? You might think that you're stressed out because you have too much to do, but really it's your like attention is split in a million different ways. You have to get something done for the day. And there might be 10 things that you need to do and it feels overwhelming. It's like, what do I focus on? You're doing a little bit of this, you're doing a little bit of that, a little bit of the other thing, and you're not making real progress in anything. Which leads to point number 2, is that we can't create progress without our full attention, right? To really get something done, it requires depth, depth of focus. Like, you gotta lock in and really focus on what you're doing to get any significant progress. When we're just putting a little bit of attention to, you know, 5, 6 different things in a 90-minute, 2-hour block, you're not really getting anywhere. And that's kind of adding to your stress because you're like, you're not seeing any significant progress. You're just seeing a little bit in each, but because we couldn't stay focused and put our full energy and attention into one thing. So we want to reduce our scattered effort and just focus on the single thing that moves the needle the most, right? That's the other thing is we have to accept, and there's multiple studies that talk about this, that we cannot effectively multitask as human beings. That's just a fact. So if we can agree on that point, the next point becomes about, okay, well, if we can only focus on one thing at a time, what is the highest leverage thing I can be doing, right? What is the thing that moves me the closest to where I want to go? And what is that? And let me do it right now. So pick that thing. There might be 10 things. What's the highest leverage thing? Okay, let's focus on that one thing and put our full energy and attention into doing that one thing. And you can release all your worry about, oh, I got to do this, I got to do that, because you, you know that you're working on the most important thing. And we know that we can only work on one thing at a time, and that this is the most important of those things. So put your full energy and attention into it, do it, and when it's done, you just move on to the next thing. Okay, I know. And you can let go of your worry because this is the most responsible thing to do. You've picked the highest leverage task and you're working on it, and you're working on it to completion. And then you're doing the next highest leverage task, and the next, and the next. And that's how we work through our day. We can't do a million different things. We got to ask ourselves, you know, in our business, real estate, it's like, what's closest to the money? What's the highest money-making activity I can do? Let me do that first, and then I'll do the other things. And, you know, there's other studies too, like the constant mental switching between tasks. I think Jim, Jim Quick talks about this in the book Limitless. But every time that you like focus in on something, then you change your focus, that drains your attention because you have to recalibrate and refocus. So it's a very inefficient way to operate, like, from an energy standpoint, to be constantly switching tasks. So time blocks are a super effective thing. There's a state of being called flow, and when we're in flow, we can get more done. So the goal is to be in flow at all given times, and the studies show that if you work in 90-minute to 2-hour blocks on one task, that gives you sufficient time to get into a state of flow. That's when everything feels effortless, right? You lose track of time. You pick your head up like, oh my gosh, that was 2 hours. That's how we want to be working every single day. It's like we focus in, we relax, we pick the highest leverage thing, and we just go. And working in these 90-minute to 2-hour blocks is so effective because it takes about like 15-20 minutes to really get into a state of flow. So if you're switching every 10, 5, 10, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, you're not even giving yourself enough time to get into flow. From that like 20-minute mark to the 90-minute mark, that's when you're just laser focused. Everything is easy, you're getting so much done. And this is when we're actually able to get more done with less effort. Like, it feels so effortless. And we're getting more done, which is the beauty of it. Like, you can have your cake and eat it too. I think we think that in order to be productive, we gotta stress and we gotta put pressure on ourselves. We gotta do all these things. We don't have to do that. We can be in a regulated, relaxed state and still get a ton of stuff done. So to wrap all this up, the real solution is just focus on one thing. You know, Gary Keller, founder of Keller Williams, has a great book called The One Thing. It's like, hey, if you want to be successful in life, just in general, at a high level, like when you're pursuing a vision, you got to focus on one thing. But also in your day-to-day, you can only ever focus on one thing, and you will be so much less stressed out, so much less scatterbrained, and you'll feel so much less pressure and anxiety and worry and all these things if we can just focus on one thing at a time. So for this week, I want you to think about that. So this is something simple that you can just do with this week. What is the one thing that actually matters the most right now? And let's do that thing, or create a list. Create a list of 10 things that you got to get done today or this week and just categorize them and just start chipping away at the list. All you can do is what you can do. You can't can't do everything. Again, you're going to stress yourself out by saying, oh, I got to get all these things done to get there and all this. No, right? Focus on the one thing that moves the needle. That's what I'm doing every single day. Every single day, like in the morning, hey, what's the biggest thing that moves the needle for me right now? Okay, it's doing hiring for the business because we need to make sure we have good talent. I'm just focusing on hiring first. I'm not adjusting systems and adjusting drip campaigns and doing other little text message verbiage that's going to help the salespeople out. No, I'm worried about talent. Or I'm worried about, you know, coaching one of the managers. I'm focused on outreach for Build, right? I'm focused on cold outreach or warm outreach. I'm focused on making content. Whatever that single highest leverage thing is every single day, I'm doing it, and then I'm moving on throughout my day. So in closing, if there's one thing to take from this, okay, it's going to be this: a lot of your stress, it's not coming from how much you have to do, it's coming from trying to hold too many things at once. So when you simplify your focus, everything is going to feel a lot lighter, okay? You're going to think clearer, you're going to move faster, and you're going to stop carrying that constant background tension that's causing you so much stress. If this episode helped you see that a little bit more clearly, share it with someone who's been feeling overwhelmed or stuck in their head. If you are not in the Built For Impact School community, you can get in there. We have a 7-day free trial and you can get access to all the stuff in there. You can get in there, watch the orientation videos, take the Built Operating System assessment to see how your system handles pressure. You can take the 7-day internal reset challenge. You get a free weekly call that you can hop on, all within that 7-day free trial. So you had nothing to lose. You could just go in there and screenshot the 7-day Internal Reset Challenge, take the assessment, watch the videos, watch the Foundation Course, and dip out. And you would have bettered your life just from doing that. So get in there, you got nothing to lose. I'll see you on one of those weekly calls. But until next time, all the peace, all the power.