Happy Sunday everyone! Today I wanted to quickly discuss something that’s important to me in making success in my life. When you begin a task, or are assigned a task, even walk into a room that looks like your kids literally threw a stick of TNT in a room and exploded with toys everywhere…. You need to make sure that tasks get done.
The assignment, task, chore, etc. can seem extremely difficult at first. The important thing to do is to FOCUS.
Image taken with my iPhone
I’m using the book with magnifier as an example for accomplishing your tasks. When you take your fist take a look at your book you see that it’s going to be 300-400 pages long. If you are not a big fan of reading the book will scare you off. You then take a look at the table of contents and you see that the book is broken up into chapters. Even these chapters can be long. 10, 20, or even 30 pages. But, then as you continually break down the layers of the books you realize that its obviously broken down into pages. And as the image alludes, you can narrowly FOCUS on a specific segment of the book to read in accomplishing you goal of reading the book.
So, what is it that you do to accomplish the task of reading the book. Well it’s fairly common sense… you start with page one and read until it’s done. But, in this situation you are subconsciously breaking the book down into manageable tasks. You decide how long you want to read. That turns into a mini-milestone of a set of pages read. If the book is a real page turner then you make the choice of: do I keep reading, or do I go do the next thing for the day? As you progress in your read you accomplish each little task and before you know it the book is read!
You can take this same approach with your larger tasks you see in everyday life. An easy example I’ll use is when I am directing/assisting my kids cleaning their room. A side note: it takes little if no time at all for 4 children under 11 years of age to completely TRASH their room. I mean clothes on the floor, bedding tossed, toys everywhere. Something that could drive a person insane. When I approach the topic with my kids I break up the job into smaller tasks. First, I tell my kids of a goal at the end of a task. I usually tell my kids that there is a movie night or some fun at the local park if they completely clean their room. That’s motivation in itself for them (it works 95% of the time). I tell my kids that they have to find an item that they want to pick up and they have to pick it up. They choose their thing they want to clean and they clean it up. One picks up dirty clothes and puts it in the laundry for washing. Another will pick the sheets back up and place them back on the beds. Yet another will sort the toys into piles per child. After about 30 minutes the room is about 80% clean. Now, an important note. I do not sit there like a dictator in telling them to clean. I will take a small task, usually picking up trash in the room, and help clean with them. Showing the kids that I’m helping in the tasks helps keep them motivated. And before I know it everything is done.
This works for me as I mentioned about 95% of the time. But, it’s much better than being upset 100% of the time just telling to clean and I sit on my laurels.
The point of the examples that I’m making is that you can take anything that may seem insurmountable, break into manageable pieces/tasks, and slowly progress to task completion. There will always be situations where you will be confronted with failure. Taking a task and breaking down into segments, and working on each segment specifically is a way to FOCUS on what you need to do. And, FOCUS will lead you to success.
An extra bonus, an upvote and Kudos to anyone who can tell me what the book in the picture is... hint: its Star Wars related.
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