You wake up to a lovely morning ready to start your day. You first do a quick check in on your social media sites and got flooded with all kinds of information some of them seem beneficial, some not so. If you have already planned your day, you start trying to execute your plan. If not planned, then you start getting busy looking for things you can do.
Half way through the work, you feel a burning desire to post about your weekend beach party, comment on Arianna's post and reply to a sarcastic tweet by Mark. Before even analyzing whether you should wait or just do it now, You've already uploaded the pictures thinking of a lovely caption to write.
After an hour of nice engagement, you get back to work but now your focus is lost, it's hard to continue. You find it more interesting to explore other things than the work at hand.
By the end of the day, you've done many things that seem urgent but none that's actually important.
Busy Doesn't Mean Productive
You can be busy for a whole week without achieving anything worthwhile or progressing on your journey. Often times, what you don't notice is the difference between urgent work and important work. Urgent work are normally maintenance work, things that keep the engine running, checking the parts seeing if they're working smoothly. Important work is things that move the needle forward, achieving tangible results. If you spend most of your time doing maintenence without actually driving then it will be obvious that you're not going anywhere. Yet people try to fool themselves that as long as they're doing something, they're moving forward!It's like this 'status signaling' on social media where everybody is posting about what they're doing so you also want to post about what you're doing. So that it looks like everybody is doing something but who's actually doing something important or moving forward? Most of the time, we sacrifice quantity for quality.
Plugging the leaks means cutting out unnecessary distractions that eat away your time and focus. It's about focusing on the most important tasks at hand while keeping all the noise at bay. In the course of a day, many things will try to catch your attention, inviting you to take action. That's just how the attention economy works. Your concentration keeps leaking with every notification that pops up on your device pulling you out of your focused state of mind.
Learning to plug the leaks implies taking a different standpoint towards distractions. Instead of getting sucked by distractions, you eliminate the source of the distraction itself(at least temporarily). When you empty the room and shut the door, nothing can enter inside unless you open the door. So shut the door and get to work. It's seems boring but that's when the miracles happen. Nothing much can be achieved when the mind is agitated. Artist know this quite well that's why they always paint at silent places, away from the noise. Poets do the same when they write their masterpieces.
Conclusion
When you plug the leaks, you eliminate distractions. Once distractions are eliminated, you can focus on the work. With focus, you're able to become productive which eventually moves the needle forward.That's how important things get done, wasting no time on distractions. We all have 24 hours in a day, some do a lot, some don't. What matters is progress, a day shouldn't pass without you not moving the needle forward.
I know it's easier said than done. I failed many times before I was able to do it amateurly. Achieving anything worthwhile isn't easy. Practice is key.
