2019: The Year of Hyper-Focus

We are fully into 2019! If you haven’t done so yet, it’s a great time to reflect on last year and look at areas that can be built upon, improved on, and/or eliminated. For many of us, distraction has been a primary factor in why we fell short in reaching some of our most important goals. Distraction usually comes in many forms and from various angles and is sometimes best dressed as opportunity. This year should be a year centered on reducing those distractions and staying hyper-focused. It may be as simple as becoming aware that those distractions exist in the first place. Here are some tips to help you become more focused.

Less is more

A couple years ago, I had struggled to gain traction in business development. There had been plenty of opportunities and tons of development happening within the industry, but I hadn't seen the fruits of my labor like I had hoped. Weekly sales meetings had become more of a stressor than a motivator and I had spent just as much time trying to put together weekly reports to justify efforts. It had been completely counter-productive to say the least. Conversion rates were horrible and at the end of the day I had no real relationships maintained.

In 2018, I had focused on pursuing only five prospective clients per week. The results had showed immediately! I had seen a tremendous boost in meetings and proposals and had become much happier in my efforts. Business had grown and so did our company revenues. The time I had spent putting together weekly sales reports was cut by nearly 75%, and I had started to build more meaningful relationships. Less truly became more!

This year, I encourage you to spend more time strategizing on a super targeted short-list of prospective clients/customers. It’s easy to get distracted with chasing attractive opportunities as there are many of them out there. Learn to say “No!” and keep focused on your weekly, quarterly and annual goals. Your successes may not come immediately, but eventually your relationships will start to bear fruit. You’ll also find that you will achieve the same intended results with much less effort. By focusing on less, you will also eliminate stress and anxiety from your diet... Giving you a better frame-of-mind to focus!

Find an Accountability Partner or Two

In college, I had sold books door-to-door for over eighty hours per week during the summers on behalf of the Southwestern Company. My successes were achieved primarily from the accountability I had with a couple of my teammates slash roommates. We had morning pump-up sessions, nightly conference calls and weekly meetings that focused on keeping each other accountable to our individual goals. That kind of accountability had acted as a motivator to keep each of us from slacking. At the end of each week, none of us wanted to be the one that hadn’t lived up to our commitments! It had kept us real.

Life gets extremely hard, especially for the entrepreneur. If we aren’t careful, we can easily fall off the wagon after committing to doing things. We always have grandeur plans and ideas that look feasible and easy to achieve. However, reality generally proves differently. We rarely plan for obstacles outside of our control and when they finally hit us we are completely derailed.

For the same reason that people hire physical trainers at the gym and ask sponsors to assist at Alcoholic Anonymous support groups, we need to implement accountability partner(s). Having a few people that keep you accountable to your commitments accomplishes two main things: First, it will keep you from making excuses. And secondly, it provides positive reinforcement in keeping you on track when the going gets tough! Accountability partners essentially keep you in the game by providing emotional support, motivation, constructive criticism and feedback. Think of an accountability partner as a free life coach.

Live and Die by One Calendar

Many of you already use a calendar. Some of us have several calendars. I think it’s extremely important to note the importance of using a single calendar when attempting to become more focused. If you are truly going to achieve your goals, you should be keeping a tight-knit calendar. Bouncing in between different calendars becomes a hassle and more time consuming than it's worth.  Minimizing to one calendar will also help you become more efficient with data input and tracking.

The great thing about keeping track of your goals in one all-inclusive calendar is that you can effectively manage your time with other calendar items without adding multiple steps. Before this last year, I had used four separate calendars! The reason I had done so was to keep personal items from getting commingled with professional items. However, it had become a lot more work and I couldn't remember what was going on. In the same way, having too many efficiency apps to help you stay organized can have the reverse effect; more time, more work, more clutter.

At the end of the day, it’s about efficiency. This year, commit to using a single calendar for every item in your life. You’ll come away with a sense of positive power and control in knowing that you have mastered something by reducing some much needed action steps. Parlay that positive energy into other areas of your life.

Evaluate & Grade Yourself Weekly

This is huge! If our lives only become only about knocking things off of lists and checking boxes, we are going to be some very unhappy people on our journey to become hyper-focused. It’s critical reward yourself along the way. A key component to feeling successful is to evaluate yourself often. Documenting how well you are doing will give you a sense of direction for how to improve each week, too. Weekly evaluations will give you an honest assessment on adjusting and improving the things you can control. At the end of each week, evaluate your efforts and grade yourself in several different areas. 

How many contacts did you reach out to (compared to how many you said you would reach out to)? What was the overall intensity during the week? Could you have given a little bit more effort? Did you finish the week strong or just coast into the weekend? Did you get distracted and waste some precious time? Did you really give 100% at the gym? With your children? These are all great questions you can ask yourself on a weekly basis when evaluating your performance. Put together a list of static questions and grade yourself on each question with the score of 10 as the common denominator.

What’s an evaluation without a reward attached to it? Positive reinforcement will keep the drive alive when things start to feel monotonous. It feels great when you can score yourself high and then go out for a juicy steak to celebrate a good week. Weekly evaluations will also bring you back down to earth on a consistent basis, and will help you maintain focus. If you really want to step up your game, have your accountability team evaluate you! A high score (9/10 or 90%) would also visually bring back a sense of focus to your end goals!

Work Backwards

You may have a goal of becoming a millionaire in 2019. But, how will you achieve that goal? When setting your goals, start with your annual long-term goal and then work backwards to your quarterly goals, and so forth. Your quarterly goals (or lesser goals) should eventually make the long-term goal possible. For example, if I were to work backwards from my annual goal into quarterly goals, I might break $1M into four equal $250,000 quarterly goals.

After you have laid out your goals from long-term to short-term, it will be much easier to develop your action plan from short-term to long-term. You’ll find that by seeing your goals in this structure will help them appear to be much more attainable and manageable. Place your daily and weekly action plan items in your calendar and make sure you are committing to pursuing them on a daily basis.

This upcoming year has the potential to be a phenomenal year for you! There is no reason why you can’t achieve all the goals on your list. If you can learn to become more efficient in your efforts, become highly organized with what you are pursuing and find a group of people that will hold you accountable to the things you want, you will blow things out of the water! Become hyper-focused and do not waver from the things you truly want. When distractions pop-up, acknowledge that they are there and make educated & strategic decisions to whether or not they should be pursued. I wish you all much success in 2019!