Dan In Focus

Our guest writer is Thom Stratton. He has an MBA, worked on a newspaper, writes Simple Self Reliance (a blog on recapturing lost arts of doing it yourself), worked as a requirements analyst, actually understands social media marketing and is at least ten times smarter than me. He also started a business this year, too.

I’ve been watching my children this week, and I can’t quite come to a conclusion about their level of discipline. On the one hand, they can be very focused. They can spend hours busily working away on their latest Lego creation. Everything else is tuned out–the house could fall down around their ears and they’d notice only if it happened to effect what they are working on.

On the other hand, get them at the dinner table or working on homework, and the slightest distraction will have them completely off on a tangent for the next ten minutes. We can coax, cajole, threaten, and fume, but they will not focus to save their lives, no matter what they might be delaying with their distraction.

Now I’m sure most people can spot the problem right away: it all depends on whether they enjoy what they are doing or not. Playing is very, very important. Eating dinner or doing homework…well, not so much. The same laser-like focus that keeps them engaged in their fun will keep them engaged in ignoring whatever unpleasantness is before them.

We as adults have (hopefully) learned something our children have not: distraction and procrastination will not make the unpleasant task go away. It will still be there waiting for us. It’s better to just face it, dive in, and get it over with. Then we can move on to more enjoyable things.

Yes, we’ve all learned this valuable lesson, right? Sometimes I wonder. I think in some ways we’re still very much children. We just become more sophisticated in our avoidance tactics. It’s amazing how, when faced with an unpleasant task, I can be extremely productive–on every other task on my list. I can find tasks I never realized existed a few hours ago, but are now of such high priority that I simply must do them now instead of whatever it is I’m avoiding.

So I guess we’re not all that different from children. I’m not, at least. Then how do we, as adults, make ourselves do the things we don’t really want to do? I’m going to start looking into a few of the ways I do it and report back. In the mean time, here’s a post from Dan on one way he does it: Goals and Rewards.