Lately I have been having trouble focusing. I do a little on this project, a little on that….and nothing gets done! There is nothing like a bunch of half finished projects staring at you. It makes me just want to go back to bed!
But then I remembered something I’d read somewhere…. (there’s that scattered brain again, something…somewhere!). It said that chaos on the outside was a reflection of chaos on the inside.
I looked around my office… and I saw chaos. Stacks of paper waiting to be filed. Sticky notes everywhere reminding me of …who knows what, there were so many of them! The garbage can was overflowing and everything had a thin layer of dust…you get the picture. I’d been so busy ping ponging from one project to the next that I hadn’t had time to clean. I decided to do something different. Instead of working on one of the 20 unfinished projects lying around, I started filing them away. I set up a nice system so I could see what needed to be done, but instead of files this way and that across my desk, they were standing in a neat orderly line in a file rack on my desk. I put my pens in my pen drawer and my checkbook in my bill pay drawer. I took all those sticky notes and found that most of them I could just throw away. I transfered the others to a neat to-do list. I dusted and cleaned and emptied the trash. It felt so good to put order to the chaos, that I managed to stay focused and finish the job! But it got even better. With the chaos without taken care of, the chaos within subsided, and I was able to sit down and put in a good day of work. The number of files standing neatly on my desk diminished, and much of the underlying stress went away. I even took a minute at the end of the day to put everything away and get ready for the next day.
So if you are having trouble staying focused, take a look around you. See if maybe taking care of the chaos in your enviroment, can take care of the chaos in your brain!