Staying Focused By Asking The Right Question

Author - Mari L. McCarthy
Published - September 21, 2016

By Liem Nguyen

Journaling-Power-Journal.jpgToday we live in a world full of distractions and productivity thieves that demand our time and attention. Staying focused can be very challenging especially if you are an entrepreneur trying to deal with clients, employees, emails, phone calls, and meetings at the same time. So how do we stay focused?

In my opinion, the easiest way to stay focused is to concentrate your time and effort only on the activities that produce results. You know the 80/20 principle, or the law of the vital few, which states that nearly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Basically 80% of the results you are generating come from 20% of the tasks you do. Identifying that 20% is very important. But what if you can find out what the 20% of the 20% that produce the most results?

I learned this principle from the book called "The ONE Thing" by Gary Keller. The key to achieving your goal is to focus on one specific thing at a time. How do you do this? By asking the focusing question below:

What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

You can apply this principle in many areas of your life. For me, I applied it in my business.

If you run an online business, chances are you need people to visit your website to purchase your products or services. The visitors can come from many different channels such as social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc...), email newsletters, banner advertising, search traffic, etc...

After analysing my business, I decided to focus on search traffic, which means people coming to your website from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc... Then I even narrowed it down to one thing: optimizing my website to receive traffic from Google. This became my main focus. After concentrating on this for a few months, I started to see a significant increase of the visitors to my website.

There are so many productivity tips available online which you can use to help you stay focused. The focusing question above worked for me. So my question for you is, what's the ONE thing that you can do right now to help you achieve your daily goal which will help you achieve your weekly goal, monthly goal and yearly goal?

BIO:

Liem-Nguyen_1352096.jpgLiem Nguyen is an entrepreneur. Right now he works with http://www.worldclassseminars.com/. He's keen on learning personal development and helping small businesses to generate more leads. You can follow him on Twitter at @LiemSuccess

Reference: The ONE Thing by Gary Keller.  http://www.the1thing.com/

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