Toward Greater Focus: The Favorites & Bookmarks Challenge

Confession time: I’ve been asking myself lately if the way I spend my time always reflects my highest priorities. Ever feel like "other things" have been stealing your time and attention from the projects that are most important to you?

Guess what I decided to do about it? I mentioned it to my coach (Yeah, I have my own coach– it’s great!)

She asked me some questions about my thinking behind this concern and we explored together. Is it a time management problem? Inability to “multi-task?” Have I been using the right personal organization tools in just the right way, given the nature of my projects and the way my mind functions? Do I need to block out focus times on my calendar a bit differently?

An Unplanned Journey Back Through Time

This conversation with my coach was probably in the back of my mind as, a day or so later, I spent some time trying to find a web page I was quite certain I had saved as a “favorite.” It had been four or five months since I viewed that page, and I wasn’t finding it in any of my “usual suspects” folders. Three minutes passed. Six minutes. Ten! But I was finding some old favorites that brought back old memories and made me smile, even laugh aloud a time or two. I clearly didn’t need those favorites saved anymore. Or I realized I didn’t ever need them in the first place.

The trip down memory lane was fun, but after - was it 20 minutes? Thirty? An unplanned, unproductive chunk out of my day that I would never get back. Hijacked by my Favorites!

I noted the irony: I’m often paid to help other people focus on their most important priorities, and the browser favorites I had saved and folders I created included an entire galaxy of thoughts and ideas that had distracted me away from what mattered most to me on that particular day.

Blocking Out Time to Take Back Control

I made a plan to spend time going through my favorites a bit more systematically, to clean them up. Then on the appointed day and time, I began cleaning and organizing. I laughed more as I saw things that had captured my attention five or six years earlier. But now they were only getting in the way. I deleted a good portion of my galaxy of Favorites with nary a second thought, and moved some others into or between folders so that I had the right planets orbiting together in the right solar system of Favorites. All told, it took about 25 minutes.

I had psyched myself into a ruthless approach to paring my list of Favorites down to those pages I would likely want to view in the next 12 months. Ruthless elimination: a lesson I learned from something I read once about de-cluttering a house. That mindset served me well.

While doing this, I started thinking about the discussion I had with my coach about focusing on my biggest priorities - the very process of deciding whether and where my ideas belonged in my head space and how to translate them into action. I experienced this activity as a way of making my Favorites menu - my personal gateway to the Internet - match my ideal mental framework. I was drawing a better map to information that matters most, with better road signs to the right on-ramps to the information superhighway.

Take The ‘Favorites & Bookmarks Challenge’

If you’re currently struggling with prioritization and focus when using your laptop or mobile device, why not try this fun hack? Make an appointment with yourself: 15 minutes? Thirty? Longer? Only you know how much time is right. Use that time to go through your browser favorites with the goal of eliminating and reorganizing so that you end up with a result that truly reflects your current priorities. If you don’t feel brave enough to delete things on the chance you might need them one day, think about creating an “Everything Else” folder to contain all the things that don’t pertain to your most important focus areas. Here is my highly anecdotal list of benefits that might accrue from this exercise:

Laughter. It’s not a dreadful thing to be reminded of pages you saved months or years ago and find at least some of those reminders amusing. Let yourself laugh – it’s healthy!

Perspective. Seeing the old favorites in your list may remind you of aspects of your personal journey that will challenge, inspire, or remind you of things you still find motivating for today. Or it might reinforce why it’s still important to leave some of those old things behind. Or help you to appreciate your own journey and growth.

Time. You're planning to spend a little time up-front to save yourself from spending un-planned, un-calm time trying frantically to locate something you’ve lost track of when you really need it.

Calm. How do you feel during the experience of trying to find a file or a favorite you need when you know it’s there someplace, but you just aren’t seeing it? Some of my clients have told me that de-cluttering what their eyes take in has yielded a greater sense of calm and well-being, even when they're not looking for something.

Focus. You’ll end up better able to recall where to find the important stuff, and with fewer distractions readily available to pull you away from your focus work whenever you’re searching your Favorites in the future.

Another Good Idea: Evaluate Your Device’s “Desktop”

Closely related to the idea of taming our menus of Favorites and Bookmarks, I found this excellent article ?on maintaining the visual cleanliness of our devices’ desktops, written by Natalie Walters for Business Insider and featuring the wisdom of psychologist Pamela Rutledge, PhD, MBA , director of the Media Psychology Research Center in Newport Beach, California.

My Happy Ending

By taking my own medicine and doing the Favorites & Bookmarks Challenge, I did find that Favorite I was looking for. The page I was looking for pertained to corporate balance sheets, and I had conveniently filed it in a folder where I had been keeping dessert recipes!