Cold coffee.
Splatters of brown liquid inside the dishwasher and the face of the cabinet next to it.
And a pretty light brown puddle on my kitchen floor.
I didn't empty my coffee cup before turning it upside down and putting it on the top rack of the dishwasher.
And now I had a mess to clean up.
I had been trying to do too many things at once.
Start a load of laundry. Take the garbage out. Go through the pile of papers on the end of the counter. Throw some popcorn in the microwave so we can start the movie.
And...the dishes needed to be loaded into the dishwasher.
Quick - I can do this all in two minutes, right?
Nope, I was moving way too fast and had lost my focus.
I find that happens more often these days. Trying to do too many things at once actually creates more work than I expected.
It can be hard to allow ourselves to focus on only one thing at a time. We often feel like we'll never get through the endless list of things to do if we don't do multiple things at once.
But guess what?
That endless to do list will never be done, so we might as well forget about doing it all at once!
Even before COVID and quarantines and all of the other challenges over the past year, I've felt that it's been getting progressively harder to focus.
There are lots of reasons for this, besides the fact that times of crisis cause our minds to wander and amp up our anxiety levels:
Negativity and loud opinions in the news and social media
More information than we could possibly ever digest available at the click of a button
Constant demands on our time and energy from work, family, friends.
Competing priorities and directives at work
How are we supposed to see through all of that and dial into what's truly important?
I'm a big proponent of making lists. Partly because I forget things, but also so I see the words in black and white in front of me.
I may get overly ambitious when it comes to household chores at night, but in general I have a process that I'll share with you that just might help.
In the morning, when I'm sitting with my coffee, I write down the top 3 things I need to accomplish that day.
Notice I said 3, not 10 or 20 or 100. Having too many priorities is a surefire way to lose focus.
I then write down next to each item the estimated amount of time I think it might take to accomplish.
This gives my brain some structure and makes it easier for me to tackle them without getting distracted.
And I do my best to try to focus on only one specific item during the time I estimated it would take.
During that time window, I don't open my email, I don't check my phone, and I try to tune out the rest of the world.
Everything else can wait for that 30 or 60 minutes or whatever I had allocated.
I often find that I finish all three items on my list in much less time than I expected.
Then I add the next three priorities to my list.
And so on...forever and ever amen as the saying goes.
There will always be urgent and important things that come up that will take time from our day. We have to allow for that too.
The key is to know where your focus should be.
Wandering aimlessly will typically result in very little getting accomplished, and sometimes even end up adding more to your plate.
If I had taken my own advice last night, I might have focused on the dishes and actually checked the coffee cup before putting it in the dishwasher.
And that could have saved me the extra time it took to mop the floor and clean up the mess.
I'm not perfect at this either.
I still get distracted, I still have days where too many urgent, non-important things take up most of my time.
But I figure the 80/20 rule applies here too.
If I can focus more days than not, life moves forward and I make progress.
And before I know it, a whole lot of important things have gotten done.
Focus is a beautiful thing.
Find it. Embrace it.
Get stuff done.
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