Focused and Motivated

This post includes for the most part a (slightly redacted for reading purposes) transcript from my solo podcast episode #3 “Staying focused and keeping yourself motivated” which I released Saturday 19th. At the top I’ve included the single episode in case you prefer to listen to it.

The last couple of weeks I noticed myself having more difficulty keeping focus and staying motivated. I didn’t only notice this with myself but also with a lot of people around me. I decided to dedicate this episode to staying focused and keeping myself motivated. So what’s in it for you? I’ll tell you a bit about keeping focus and keeping myself motivated in the short-term and will continue giving you some tips on staying focused and keeping your motivation.

Work environment and distractions

So coming back to the first item, staying focused in these difficult times, a lot of us have to deal with a different work environment . Many have to work at home and some have to work in workspaces which have been heavily regulated. This brings a lot of difficulties. This includes a lot of different or other distractions than we’re used to in our normal working environment. These distractions make it extra demanding to keep focus. You’ll have kids running around the house or playing outside, or there might be pets which keep asking for attention.

Regulated and demand on focus

For me personally I can still continue to go to work at the shipyard. It’s a regulated work environment compared to the normal situation however. We have to deal with regulations regarding social distancing and increased attention to personal hygiene, for example by placing dispensers with disinfectant and providing alcohol wipes.

With regards to meetings, we decided to move out meetings from meeting rooms to the open air. This makes it easier for us to manage social distancing while still having key players attend these meetings. These might seem small and relatively easy things to manage and control, they all add up to a lot of effort being needed into managing these. It’s all effort which we aren’t able to put into managing jobs at hand. Again it’s an extra demand on our ability to focus.

Goal setting and daily activities

This brings me to a mechanism I use to stay focused and which you might find beneficial in your situation and it’s through goal setting. I’m not talking about goals in the long term like months or years. I’m talking about goals on a weekly basis. So what I try to do is through my project planning or work package planning I try to decide on setting weekly goals. These can range from doing physical activities to doing your administration in for example Outlook. Setting weekly goals for me isn’t just quite enough to be able to reach these goals. I need to break them down into smaller bits.

What I do is translate them into daily activities. These daily activities I’m able to put into daily checklists which I’m able to tick off once things get done. Now I mentioned writing down these activities which is literally what I do in a pocket sized notebook. But do whatever works for you. Whether it’s writing them down on post-its or writing them down in an agenda which could be your outlook agenda. At the end of the day you’ll be surprised how fulfilling it is to see the amount of activities you were able to finish.

Adversity

This brings me to the second phenomenon I mentioned earlier and it’s keeping yourself motivated during the upcoming difficult weeks. I got inspired to do this talk by a conversation I had with one of our nephews a couple of days ago. He’s gotten seriously ill and because of this he’s unable to physically attend his classes for his studies. He’s forced to follow his classes online in order to keep progress on his program. He continued to tell me he was getting demotivated by his progress. It appeared he’s comparing his current progress to a situation in which he would have been completely healthy which is a human thing to do. At this point we paused and I asked him to step back and take a look at the studying goals he wanted to achieve this week. He answered he’d been able to achieve most of his weekly goals but he was bothered by the smaller thing which he wasn’t able to do.

Example from a management point of view

Now I have been lucky to have not been seriously ill but this made me think about one of the difficult projects I was involved with in my career. It was a vessel on which I was a production team lead and we had to deal with a whole range of problems. They ranged from missed detailed engineering to a lot of production issues. In the end our team and I were responsible to solve these issues and we were able to finish the project with a positive mind set. It absolutely didn’t happen automatically though in hindsight there were a couple of things which kept me from buckling under the stress and pressure.

Mechanism in project AND self management

In short these were first setting weekly goals, secondly breaking down these weekly goals into daily jobs, thirdly on a daily basis evaluating whether we had achieved our daily goals and if not we’d immediately replan those jobs. Finally, and this is absolutely crucial, at the end of the day when leaving the gates of the shipyard I’d look back and tell myself I’d done everything in my power to finish my daily jobs and achieve the daily goals. The ones which we weren’t able to do we’d already replanned and we were going to take on the next day with double the effort. This mindset kept me from losing sleep at night or having a mental breakdown.

Coming back at the conversation I had with my nephew, I asked him to take a look at the things which he wanted to do this week and he’d actually finished instead of losing focus and energy on those which he wasn’t able to finish. He thanked me for pointing out this way of thinking as it gave a boost of self confidence. The great thing is he’d already done all the hard work himself. I only had to remind him of it. We agreed to talk again in one week to check on how he was doing.

3 Tips on staying Focused and keeping yourself Motivated

I’ll recap on my tips to stay focused and keep yourself motivated during the upcoming difficult weeks.

1. Firstly set your weekly goals in whichever way you want.
2. Secondly break down these weekly goals into smaller daily jobs and mark the jobs you’ve finished. At the end day replan those which you didn’t.
3. Finally at the end of the day look back and tell yourself you’d done everything you could to finish your daily jobs and daily goals. The things which you weren’t able to do you’ll take on the next day(s) with double the effort. This increases the chance of putting your mind at rest at the end of a busy and hectic day so you can have a good night’s rest. Getting enough rest is one of the things which is extremely important when dealing with stressful situations.

If you’re interested in reading a post about keeping overview I wrote my post “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” using boxing legend Muhammad Ali as an example. Check out my post “Adversity and communication” on the importance of keeping up lines of communication in adverse situations. In it I try to, from own experience working in complex technical teams with a range of different disciplines, give some tips in getting a broken down line of communication running again when routes to a solution are still needed.

Thanks for reading this blog post. If you enjoyed reading it I welcome you to listen to the episode to. You can find episode #3 by searching for “jayant.biz” in the known podcasting apps like Apple podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher and Google Play Music. If you do please leave a positive rating in the podcast app you used to listen to the episode. This motivates me to continue producing worthwhile content. If you didn’t enjoy it or want to provide feedback I encourage you to leave me a comment under this post. I’m always eager to learn and improve myself. Till next time!