Jermaine Edwards defines focus as the disciplined pursuit of one thing until completion with excellence, and productivity as the disciplined pursuit of less but better. He walks through a filtering process to identify your highest-priority activity, then breaking down tasks to concentrate on the most valuable parts.
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Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide. If you're old, welcome back to the fold. If you're new, welcome. We're going to be talking in this video about how to increase your focus and productivity. So let's talk about focus and productivity. We know instinctively if we aren't focused, if we aren't productive, it's very unlikely we're going to achieve anything in business, work, or life. So how do we increase our focus and productivity? How do we create those habits, those behaviors, those routines to ensure that we're consistently delivering on the things that matter? Well, let's break this down. So let's start with focus. Now, focus for me is the disciplined pursuit of one thing until completion with excellence. The disciplined pursuit of one thing Until completion with excellence. So we want to make sure that we understand the highest priority so we can really lock in and bring our energy and our effort into that task. But how do we do that? Well, we need a filter to do that, and that filter helps us to determine what that highest priority is. So some questions you might ask yourself are: what are the most important things, or the one most important thing that if I did today would make all activities easier to do, I could eliminate them, or at least the activity would give me the highest possible return on results. That's the kind of way in which you think about focus and finding the highest priority. That's all about focus. That pursuit of that one thing until completion with excellence, bringing energy and effort. Now let's talk about productivity. Productivity is the disciplined pursuit of less but better. Now we all have 24 hours in the day, but actually we're probably not using 24 hours in terms of focus and productivity. We usually have maybe 2 or 3 hours, 4 hours if you're lucky, of real consistent work. And so if that's the case, we need to think about our work and our activity differently. So let's just say for a moment that you recognize that your highest priority in a week is to call your customers, all of them. Maybe there are 20 customers that you have. Now you know you have finite time, and maybe that particular week you only have 2 hours. Now, whoa, 20 customers, 2 hours, and you know they're about 30 minutes each. How do you think about productivity in that time. Now, most people would say you just try to cram them all into 2 hours. That might not be the best solution. So I suggest something else to you. How about looking at productivity through a different lens? Because productivity is about the one thing inside the one thing and understanding where it fits within the highest priority. Let's just say that you have 20 customers and you may have 30 minutes, and it's on average 30 minutes to make those calls. Well, let's just look at this differently. Within those 30 minutes, what are you actually discussing? What are these specific agenda points? And are there agenda points on that list that if you focused on with the customer would give you and them a higher return on your call? Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest there probably are one or two items on that list that you focused on for maximum 15 minutes perhaps, you could get more from that call than if you actually allocated 30 minutes. So tell your customer, hey, you've identified one or two items here that will give you and the customer greater return on investment, so you can make that possible. That's how you make focus and productivity work in the time that you have. That disciplined pursuit of less but better within the time that you have, focused on the highest priority. That's how you become more focused and productive. Let's talk about a strategy, and a strategy that you must put into place is to eliminate distraction. Your phone, the alerts on your laptop, you know, people who come over to you consistently. We need to tell them to give us some space, at least to make those things that are important the most important thing for you. So make those things really important. Eliminate distraction, whatever that is for you. Make sure you identify those things and put them to a side. Give yourself block time if needed to make sure that you you can focus on the highest priority and allow productivity to work for you in a better way. Now I've got a resource for you, a PDF for you to download. Make sure you download it and start using it today. I want you to be more focused. I want you to be more productive and get the results that you want. Like and subscribe in this video, and I'll see you next time.
