The way we work and live is not conducive to maximal effectiveness.  In our rush-around modern lives we try to live by one long pulse during the day and then rest at night.  We are working too long and too continuously.  We are burning up our mental and emotional reserves without giving them a chance to renew.

The sleep cycle is critical to our health and most people need more than they get – 7 to 9 hours.  During the day we need to adopt a more pulsing rhythm; one that can be likened to waves.  The crest of the wave represents your burst of focus and activity and the trough your renewal time.   Instead of pulsing like waves we are paddling continuously on a flat ocean.  As a result we are less effective.  In the push for more-better-faster, we are actually doing less-worse-slower.

We are much more effective if we work in bursts of intense and focused energy and then take time to rest and renew.  Given the chance many people naturally take a nap in the afternoon.  Research indicates that after an afternoon nap you can continue to produce at a high level the rest of the day.  Without a nap, output falls dramatically.  The culture in many organizations will prevent napping, but it is a highly recommended way to renew.

Here are some tips you might want to consider.  Even though you are not working as many total hours you will likely produce a lot more.

Work in 40 to 90 minute pulses

You need to work long enough to really get absorbed and into the flow, but not too long.

Renew in 10 to 60 minute breaks

The length of the break depends on the length and intensity of the pulse.  There are no rules here.  Find a rhythm that works for you.  The key is to ride your waves and then take time to renew.

Renewal breaks must be real

Switching from an intensely creative effort to processing a batch of email may seem like a break, but it is pseudo-renewal.  It may be better than nothing, but you need real renewal.  Some suggestions:

• Take a 20 to 30 minute power nap
• Go for a walk, preferably in nature – don’t think about work
• Talk a casual stroll around the office
• Focused breathing
• Meditation
• Work Out
• Yoga
• Eat lunch away from your desk, preferably with friends
• Get up and go chat with a colleague or friend
• Read something light and cheerful
• Close your eyes and listen to some music

Some day organizations will wake up and pay for output and not time.  In the meantime, if you work for someone who doesn’t get it then you might have to get creative:

• Take your laptop or paper materials and go hide in a conference room – look like you are going to meet with someone.
• Put on some headphones with music and pretend you are looking through some papers – you don’t actually have to be doing anything other than resting.
• Walk around the office like you are going to the printer room or break room, etc.  Take your time.
• If you are on a leash and collar go sit in the bathroom.  It may sound silly, but desperate circumstances call for desperate measures.

What do YOU think?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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I sat down to write an article on why being busy is a mistake and I decided I should check the dictionary definition of the word.

bus·y –adjective: actively and attentively engaged in work or a pastime

That’s not exactly what I had in mind.  That definition of “busy” makes being busy a good thing.  If I’m sitting on a beach lost in a good book, then I’m busy; I’m actively and attentively engaged in a pastime I love.  It’s very important to me.  However, most people wouldn’t call me busy nor look upon what I was doing as something important or productive.  The soccer mom with 1,000 things to do while helicoptering around her children would be called busy.  If she was my wife I would be called lazy.

Imagine an office.  Compare and contrast two employees.

One of them has a to-do list of hundreds of tasks.  She is constantly on the go with phone calls, emails, instant messages, and meetings.  She moves at 100 mph, barely stopping to breathe.  She comes in early, works through lunch, and leaves late.  She’s always connected  and working issues when out of the office.  She is definitely “busy”.

The other employee casually and calmly walks in around 9:00 AM.  He spends a bit of time chatting with some of his co-workers.  Then he quietly sits down and concentrates on some work.  He doesn’t go to any meetings.  At 11:45 AM he opens his email and spends a few minutes answering them and makes a few notes.  At 12:00 PM he wraps up for the day and leaves.  He doesn’t seem to be “busy”.

In a modern corporation the second person would probably be fired while the first would be considered an extremely valuable employee.  Most people knowing nothing else would probably strongly prefer the first over the second as she demonstrates hard work and extraordinary dedication.  In my former days I would have done the same.

Now I think differently about all this.  Nowadays, knowing nothing else I would choose the second.  The first employee may be “busy”, but that doesn’t mean she’s doing valuable or important work.  In fact her busyness may be disrupting other people and preventing them from doing important work.  The second employee may be a game changer.  The fact that somebody works 15 hours a day means nothing.  What matters is what they create, not how many things they do.  One good idea is worth more than 1,000 trivial completed tasks.

I used to be busy in a way that looked more like the first.  Now my goal is to be more like the second; I’m much of the way there.

Important work can be hard and lonely.  Doing a 1,000 small things is like a drug addiction.  Every time you respond to an email, go to a meeting, complete a trivial tasks, it is like taking a hit.  You get a temporary high.  You feel good about completing something.  You feel important and needed.  It’s a sickness and an addiction with long-term consequences you don’t want.

Everybody has the same amount of time.  Everybody gets 1440 minutes a day.  Don’t say “I don’t have time” or “I’m too busy”.  In that respect we are all equal; we all have the same allocation of daily minutes.

I’m tired of being busy in a 24/7 connected world.  I want to be valuable.  I want to do what is important to me.  I don’t want to be in a constant state of high-tension stress because I’m “busy” and because I have too much to do.  I want to be calm and reflective and quietly go about getting important work done.  I’ve decided being busy is no longer for me.

“Less is not more.  Less is better.” — Leo Babauta

You might also be interested in Scott Berkun’s The Cult of Busy.

What do YOU think?  Are you busy?  Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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This is the third article in the series describing Leo Babauta’s ideas from his book Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta.  I highly recommend it.

The other articles can be found here:

The Power of Less – Setting Limits
The Power of Less – Identify the Essential

Focus

Focus is your most important tool in becoming more effective.

Leo says focus on less to become more effective: Focus on one goal to achieve it, focus on a single task at a time and you’ll be more productive, and focus on the present to reduce stress and anxiety.

• Focus on a goal.  The most important factor in achieving a goal is focus.  Not self-discipline, willpower, or rewards but simply maintaining focus on a goal or habit at all times.
• Focus on the present.  Focusing on the present will reduce stress and help you live life to the fullest.  (see below)
• Focus on the task at hand.  Clear distractions and get into the flow of whatever task you decide to work on. (see below)
• Focus on the positive.  Eliminate complaining and eliminate the constant focus on problems. Instead focus on the good things and how good you’ll feel when you accomplish whatever you are working on.

How to Focus on the Present

“If we spend most of our time thinking about the past or future, we are missing life itself. It’s passing us by while we’re elsewhere. You can’t get the most out of life unless you learn to focus on being present, while things are happening. Thinking about your childhood, or your kid’s future, is useless if your kids’ childhood is passing by without you being there.” –Leo Babauta

Here are three links to being present Leo has published on his blog.  The first is the most comprehensive.

• A Simple Guide to Being Present for the Overworked and Overwhelmed
• 5 Inspirations for Being in the Moment
• Practical Tips to Practice Being Present

Focus on the Task at Hand

Single-task and do not multi-task.  Studies prove over and over again that given the same tasks, people who serially process them and single-task instead of multi-task are much more efficient at getting things done.  Total time to complete all tasks is much shorter.  Multi-tasking also creates stress.  Keep yourself sane!

How to Single-Task

• Do your most important task or tasks (MITs) first thing in the morning.  Don’t do anything else until these are done.
• Block Interruptions.  Go to a private conference room, shut your door, turn off email, cell phones, etc.
• Do small similar tasks like email, phone calls, blog reading, etc. periodically and in batches.  So maybe work on a MIT for two hours and then batch process your email.
• Every hour take a five to ten minute break and drink some water.  Every few hours eat a small healthy snack.  During your breaks completely disconnect from work and enjoy the moment.  Go outside and get some nature.

My good friend Jonathan over at Advance Life Skills wrote an excellent article on applied focus sessions.  I recommend you check it out.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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This is the second article in the series describing Leo Babauta’s ideas from his book Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta.  I highly recommend it.

The first article can be found here:

The Power of Less – Setting Limits

Identify the Essential

Choose only the essential and you will create maximal impact with minimal resources.  Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.

In contrast to most systems, in the Power of Less you learn to choose the essential first.  Most others tell you how to get things done quickly without teaching you how to determine what is most important to you.

You must constantly ask yourself, what is essential?  No matter what you are doing and when.  The context can be this hour, this day, this week, this year, or your whole life.

This is something that very few people do.  Our lives are filled with the trivial.  Are those hours of useless TV really essential to your long-term well-being?  I doubt it.  Do all of those 50 emails qualify as essential with a big impact today?  Are the hours of web surfing or online games essential to your well-being or are they an easy escape?

We rationalize everything we do as important and essential when in fact it is not.  Below are some questions to ask to help identify what is essential to you.  But keep in mind the standard must be very high.  Don’t just tell yourself everything is of the same value or everything is necessary, because it is most certainly not.  Take an axe to your non-essential activities and maximize your time by concentrating on the most important.

The Key Questions

These are not all Leo’s questions.  I’ve changed it up quite a bit.

Questions to identify the essential:

• What things give you that feeling of well-being or genuine happiness?
• What do you want out of life?
• What fills you with emotion and inspires you to want
  to make a difference?
• What are your most important values? What’s most
  important to you; the principles by which you want
  to live your life.
• What are your goals?  For your life, next year, next
  month?
• What do you love? Who, what, how you love to
  spend your time.
• What has the biggest impact? When you are making
  choices between projects, tasks, activities ask which
  one will create the biggest impact.
• What has the most long-term impact?
• What did you really enjoy doing as a kid at play?

Simplify

Simplify by eliminating anything that is not essential.

This part is easy.  Stop doing anything that you have not identified as essential.  Spend your time on your most important priorities.  This simple principle will do more to advance your real goals that almost anything else you can do.  The heart surgeon does not perform the janitorial duties in the operating room, even though he may be perfectly capable of it.  His valuable time is best spent on the patients.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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Overview

I’ve been a fan of Leo Babauta’s ideas ever since I stumbled across his blog.  His book Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta. is simply fantastic.  I’m going to give you a summary of his ideas in a series of articles starting with this one.

The other articles are listed below:

The Power of Less – Identify the Essential

Leo’s ideas are true to themselves – they are elegant examples of less.  The system has two foundational steps from which the rest of the system derives:

1. Identify the Essential
2. Eliminate the Rest

Modern society is consumption oriented.  Everything seems to be focused towards getting more stuff.  To get more stuff we spend our time getting more money.  Time is finite and so is human ability so there is a limit to what we can do.  If we maximize productivity and time management practice, we can get more tasks done.  But by trying to maximize the number of tasks we do, we end up doing unimportant things.  This dilutes our focus and takes energy away from the more important tasks.  We also end up stressed-out, overworked, and unhealthy.

Setting Limits

Setting limits forces you to choose the essential.  So set limitations for everything you do.

Setting limits is the first of Leo’s six main principles.  Leo provides a beautiful illustration of it with Japanese Haiku.  This form of poetry requires the poet to express a complete idea in 17 syllables.  In order to accomplish this, the poet must eliminate everything that is not absolutely essential to the meaning.  The result is something very powerful.

Another example.  Imagine two reporters.  Each week, one reporter writes 30 short, quick, and limited articles that get little attention.  The other reporter writes one really good article each week.  Each article has high impact and he receives awards on some of them.  The second reporter did less, focused on the long-term, and gets promotions and widespread recognition as a result.  This is the Power of Less at work.

You can choose to be like the first reporter and “Get Things Done” or you can choose to be like the second reporter and do fewer but more high impact tasks.  How do you decide what activities are high impact?  Use the following criteria:

• Long-term view – Will it make you a lot of money or get you a lot of recognition in the long-term?  Will it make you happy and contribute to your long-term well-being?
• Life changing – Your career or personal life is changed for the better in some important way.
• Makes a significant contribution to society or humanity.

Apply these criteria to your tasks, projects, and goals to help determine what is essential for your life.  I would also suggest you check out these articles:

Edit Your Life
Finding Your True Self

Setting Limits

Apply limits to all aspects of your Life – email, possessions, work hours, phone calls, internet surfing, etc.  Apply limits first to any area in your life that seems overwhelming.  It will force you to be very effective.  This is one of the greatest ideas on how to live your life I have ever found.

We lead lives filled with way too much stuff.  It weakens and dilutes our effectiveness.  Go from a limitless life of too much stuff, gadgets, information, etc. that is overwhelming, stressful and ineffective to a life of limits, focus, and incredible power.  This change will bring the following benefits:

• Simplifies your life.  Everyday life becomes stress-free and under control.
• You gain focus.  You are focused on a small number of things and you are focused only on what is important.  You stop doing everything else.
• Demonstrates that your time is valuable – others will respect this.  Firm limits on what you do demonstrates to other people that you treat your
  time as a precious resource.  You expect everyone else to treat your time the same way.
• You are more effective and you achieve more.  You are doing less busy work and more of your important work.  You aren’t spinning your wheels on the trivial.

Set limits on any area of your life that you think is overwhelming.  Examples might include:

• Email
• Number of tasks or projects
• Time spent on phone calls or internet surfing
• The number of things on your desk or workspace
• The number of subscriptions, paper or online, you regularly read

In reality this is a small fraction of the things you will ultimately want to limit.  However you need to move slowly, changing only one thing at a time until it becomes a habit.

How to Set Limits

Put a strict limit on something you do such as checking email.  Instead of 10 times a day try checking it three times a day.  Test the result.  Can you live with it?  Can you do your job with it?  The first week or so of your new habit is an experiment and you will tweak the limit as you learn more about what is reasonable for you.  Continually adjust until you find the right level and make it a habit.

Setting limits is a powerful technique to prevent common tasks from taking over your life.  I suggest you give it a spin.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

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“If you read the Apple’s first brochure, the headline was ‘Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.’ What we meant by that was that when you first attack a problem it seems really simple because you don’t understand it. Then when you start to really understand it, you come up with these very complicated solutions because it’s really hairy. Most people stop there. But a few people keep burning the midnight oil and finally understand the underlying principles of the problem and come up with an elegantly simple solution for it. But very few people go the distance to get there”  — Steve Jobs

The idea of an elegant solution, which means a simple but effective solution, is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  Modern life is complicated, but mostly because we make it complicated.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  Real genius lies in coming up with an elegant solution to anything and everything.  Darwin solved the complex issue of speciation with a very simple but brilliant idea.

Besides needing to solve the truly complex with the simple, we have another and maybe even more insidious problem.  We tend to take what is already simple and make it complicated.

Your family needs to eat so you decide to go out to dinner.  From the drama of getting the family ready and out the door and into the car, to deciding where to go, to deciding what to eat when you get there; most people make the whole thing into a complicated ordeal that drains everyone and makes it less than ideal.  What started out simple was made overly complex and unnecessarily so.  This same thing happens over and over in most of what we do.

We frantically buzz around arranging our children’s lives to make them “perfect” and all we end up doing is creating a complicated mess that prevents the child from learning how to live through their own experience and growth.  All of the drama and effort ends up being for nothing.

There are a few simple principles to successful relationships but we ruin relationships by making them a complex ordeal.  Just because you do it all the time, does not mean it is necessary.  You are making something basic into something it need not be.  Listening to the relationship chatter that goes on around me simply (ha ha) boggles my mind.  My wife was watching some retarded TV show the other day that featured a bunch of young people from a reality show having a reunion.  The blah blah blah about all of their relationship drama almost made me sick.  Even the guys were participating.  I had to put my earphones in.  This is not unusual though, because I hear it in the real world too and not just in the unreal “real world” of reality TV.

Work in a corporation and you will daily observe the perfected art of making the simple overly complex.

In my own life the other day I had a hissy fit with myself because I was having trouble moving my mouse charger.  My cluttered tangle of wires made what should have been the simplest thing in the world into a complicated ordeal.  It got my thinking again about simplicity and how it should be an overarching principle of life.  My own physical clutter is making the simple complicated, but so is the clutter in my mind and yours.  The clutter of features in our gadgets, software, and in the processes we use to do everything is making what should be a simple process of living into an unnecessarily difficult process.

I have no brilliant answers, but maybe my rambling thoughts will get you thinking about it too.  I’m going to be concentrating on simplifying again, something I got away from, and if I uncover anything brilliant I’ll let you know.

Get Free Updates to The Rat Race Trap by Email here or via a reader in the top left sidebar.  I would love to have you on board.

What do you think?  Leave a comment below.

This is the getting things done philosophy of Leo Babauta.  I have found it to be a fantastic way to move forward in a massive way.  This goes against my perfectionist, do-a-million-things-at-once, ADD nature and so it was very hard for me to accomplish.  But if you can pull it off, it’s life changing.  Recently, I found myself slipping back into some of my old habits and spinning my wheels and so I decided to refocus on a philosophy that works very well for me.

Give this a chance.  Try it for a month and I think you will be shocked at the results.  However, if you are going to truly give it a chance to work, you have to commit to it.  You can’t intellectually accept it and do something different in practice.  You might as well not bother in that case.

Identify the Essential – Step 1

1. List of all the areas that you consider essential in your work and life.  You can do one list for work and a separate list for your personal life if you wish.
2. If you make the categories so broad as to include everything, you would be cheating and undercutting your own success.  Things like “Spend quality time with my spouse” is a category that is about right.  “Work on Personal Development” might be another.  “Focus on only two projects at work” might be another.  The narrower and more defined each category, the more success you will have.  Otherwise you are just watering down the impact. “Be happy” is way too broad.  It says nothing about how you are going to be happy.
3. Now cut that list down to a maximum of six combined for both work and your personal life.  Ideally get to four, but if you must you may keep six.  This might be hard but just do it.  Everything in your life can’t be essential.  Suspend your disbelief and give it a chance to work and you will be amazed at the results.

Eliminate the Rest – Step 2

You can’t eliminate all the other stuff can you?  Oh yes you can, and it is an incredibly freeing experience when you do it.  Leo expands on ways to do this in his book the Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life.

1. If you want to accomplish the essential, you simply must eliminate the rest.  It’s a simple step to take intellectually because you cannot accomplish the essential until you eliminate the rest.
2. You need to make a very important decision in your life.  Sit down and ask yourself the following question.  Am I going to do what is important and essential in my life or am I going to continue to water down my potential fantastic life with the trivial and the less important?  I’m not suggesting that some things that didn’t make your list aren’t at some level important.  But by your own definition they are less important or they would have made your list.  Make a choice.  You are 100% accountable.
3. A common tactic to help with this is to ask yourself the following question all day long every day.  At this point in time, out of everything I could be doing, is this the very most important one to be working on?  If the answer to that question is no, then why are you doing it?  When I started using this method, it was a shocking and eye-opening experience.  I realized how habits had taken me away from what is important and into the trivial.  I think you will have the same experience.

Some Other Tactics for Eliminating the Non-Essential

• If any particular task does not progress one of your essential goals it should be eliminated.
• Start gradually as this will be a major behavioral change in your life.
• Conduct periodic reviews (daily or weekly) of all your tasks and commitments.  Eliminate any new items added that do not progress your essential goals.  Continue the gradual elimination of prior tasks until you completely eliminate all non-essential activity.
• Every day before you do anything else identify your most important tasks (MITs), your big rocks, or whatever else you call them.  I find that 1 to 3 items works best for me but your specific situation might be different.  Don’t list more than 4 or 5. These must be aligned with the areas of your life you identified as essential.  Doing MITs that are aligned with explicitly identified essential activities is the best way I have ever found to make massive progress in life.
• Each day before you start reading email and end up chasing rabbits or any other typical daily chaos, complete your 1 to 3 MIT’s.
• Say no. Unless you stop taking on commitments you will never succeed at escaping the rat race or living a happy life.  Another person’s want or desire is not a commitment on your time or your life.
• Start now.

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What do you think?  Leave a comment below.

Do you ever notice how the most simple ideas are often the most profound?  In our tendency to make things complicated, we often completely miss the the obvious.  That is probably due to our tendency to believe it couldn’t be that simple and thus our minds simply ignore those obvious answers.

Mark Joyner’s Simpleology – The Simple Science of Getting What You Want teaches what he calls “The Law of Straight Lines – the shortest path between two points is a straight line”.  The idea is that if you want to achieve a particular result, you need to follow the shortest path between where you are now and where you want to end up – walk a straight line to your target while maintaining a laser-like focus on that target.  You should follow the simplest and most direct route to that target.  You shouldn’t add any extra steps because those extra steps will delay your arrival at your destination.

Mark draws a beautiful example with a woman on a scale at one end who is “shocked” at her weight.  He then draws a straight line through various healthy foods, exercises, etc. until she gets to a beautiful body on a beach.  He contrasts that with same starting point, but this time the line loops around and around through various fattening deserts before arriving at the same beautiful body on the beach.

Even if the woman arrives at the same destination eventually, her route was many times longer.  The deserts were the extra steps that either delayed or more likely would have completely derailed her from reaching her chosen destination.  My first reaction to this was “Of course” and “That’s obvious”.  But as I thought about my own situation, I realized that I was adding tons of small and unnecessary detours to my paths to my targets.  Many times these extra steps, like the sugary deserts, would completely destroy my ability to achieve my chosen results.

This simple idea is truly profound.  It can be applied to almost anything including your thinking!  I have applied it to my own life and work and have realized tremendous benefit.  I couldn’t believe the number of steps I have been able to cut out of almost everything I do.  It is so obvious and yet I so ignored it.  If you will examine your own processes or the paths you are taking to your chosen targets in light of this principle, I believe you too will realize the same tremendously positive results.

Please subscribe and please let me know what you think.

In How to Thrive by Accomplishing the Essential I discussed the philosophy of Leo Babauta that advocates a two-step processes to simplification.  Identify the Essential and Eliminate the Rest.  Here are some tips on how to eliminate the rest.

1. If any particular task does not progress one of your essential goals it should be eliminated.
2. Start gradually as this will be a major behavioral change in your life.
3. Conduct periodic reviews (daily or weekly) of all your tasks and commitments.  Eliminate any new items added that do not progress your essential goals.  Continue the gradual elimination of prior tasks until you completely eliminate all non-essential activity.
4. For any task you are performing ask the question: “At this point in time, out of everything I could be doing, is this the very most important one to be working on?”  If the answer to that question is no then don’t do it.  If it will always be no then eliminate it.
5. Every day before you do anything else identify your most important tasks (MITs), your big rocks, or whatever else you call them.  I find that 1 to 3 items works best for me but your specific situation might be different.  Don’t list more than 4 or 5.
6. Before you start reading email and end up chasing rabbits or getting caught in email chains, or any other typical daily chaos, complete your 1 to 3 MIT’s/Big Rocks.
7. Say no. Unless you stop taking on commitments you will never succeed at escaping the rat race or living a happy life.  Another’s want or desire is not a commitment on your time or your ife.
8. Start now.
9. Stop watching TV right now!

Please comment and let me know what you think.

You can accomplish your most essential goals and make amazing improvements in your life if you will suspend your disbelief for a short period of time.  When I first ran across the ideas that follow, I was extremely skeptical.  I thought it was impossible to implement this stuff.  It was pie in the sky philosophizing.  My job responsibilities just wouldn’t allow it and there were too many obligations in my personal life.   I filled my head with reasons why this couldn’t work.  But it has and it is continuing to work.  Give it a chance.

I learned these ideas from Leo Babauta and I’ve added my own flavor to them.

Identify the Essential

1. List of all the areas that you consider essential in your work and life.  You can do one list for work and a separate list for your personal life if you wish.
2. Obviously you could make the categories so broad as to include everything, but then you would be cheating and undercutting your own success.  Things like "Spend quality time with my spouse" is a category that is about right.  "Work on Personal Development" might be another.  "Focus on only two projects at work" might be another.  The narrower and more defined each category, the more success you will have.  Otherwise you are just watering down the impact.
3. Now cut that list down to a maximum of six combined for both work and your personal life.  Ideally get to four, but if you must you may keep six.  This might be hard but just do it.  Everything in your life can’t be essential.  You just think it is right now.  Suspend your disbelief and give it a chance to work and you will be amazed at the results.

Eliminate the Rest

Huh?  You can’t eliminate all the other stuff can you?  Oh yes you can, and it is an incredibly freeing experience when you do it.  Leo expands on ways to do this in his book.  I will be posting some additional information this week as well. 

1. If you want to accomplish the essential, you simply must eliminate the rest.  Otherwise they will distract you into chaos.
2. You need to make a very important decision in your life.  Sit down and ask yourself the following question.  "Am I going to do what is important and essential in my life or am I going to continue to water down those precious areas with the trivial and the not so important?"
3. A common tactic to help with this is to ask yourself the following question all day long every day.  "At this point in time, out of everything I could be doing, is this the very most important one to be working on?"  If the answer to that question is no, then why are you doing it?  When I started using this method, it was a shocking and eye-opening experience.  I realized how habits had taken me away from what is important and into the trivial.  I think you will have the same experience.

Let me know what you think about this article and if there is anything I can to help you.

Stephen.