Almost all of my colleagues have headed home or overseas for the summer. While it means the office is quiet, I am struggling to meet deadlines as I seem to lack the discipline to get the work done. How can I focus on finishing work projects rather than daydreaming about my next holiday or what I want to do after work? DA, Sharjah
This is an office-based version of a challenge we see more and more nowadays as home working grows ever more common: I can’t motivate myself without people around me who are working.
The first thing to accept is that this really is about you and about a weakness or flaw in your professional competence. It doesn’t make you a bad person, but it does make you a potential danger to yourself and a liability to your team, so you have no choice but to man up and find a solution.
Self-discipline is what you lack and what you need to develop, so that at minimum you are as effective working alone in the office as you are when it is bustling with people.
The answer lies in structure and the imposition of clear and achievable targets each day. Plan your day carefully, setting out clearly how you are going to spend your time and what you will have achieved by various milestones such as lunch, afternoon break time and end of day. If you fail to meet these targets, be very self-critical. If you achieve them, don’t be too full of self-satisfaction: achievement should be the minimum expectation.
If your job requires you to respond to short-term demands then this dawdling and lack of focus may create immediate problems. If you manage your own workflow, doing specific tasks within specific deadlines, then you will just slowly drift further and further behind until you can’t possibly catch up, and then your inefficiency will be obvious to all.
Neither of these are good outcomes.
So take the time you can control each day and make a schedule, with clear targets. Anything you don’t get done build in to the next day. Set weekly achievement targets for yourself. Be competitive with yourself and be prepared to be very self-critical if you don’t meet targets when the reason is because you have begun to drift again.
Manage your environment as best you can. What helps you to concentrate? Listening to music works for many people. If that’s your thing, then have your music playing in your ears at work. What are your time-stealing temptations? Is it browsing the internet? Then make getting on line a harder thing than a simple click. Bury your browser so you have to make a conscious effort to go to it and get online. If you have to go online for business, then get offline as soon as you have done what you need to do.
You mention daydreaming. Until you are strong enough to resist the temptation to daydream, try actually building dream-time into your day – five minutes at the end of each hour or at the end of each completed task. Keep a timer on your desk with an alarm and make yourself stop when the alarm goes off and the reward time is over. I suggested this to someone recently who then accused me of treating them like a child. I explained that this basic lack of self-discipline was an issue frequently found in children, rather than in adults, so a childlike solution often worked really well.
Some people find it helps to sit close to someone who doesn’t share this problem. Maybe a summertime desk shift would work: sit closer to someone who is a better role model for productivity than you are, and try to match their focus.
Think of situations where you do focus and work well. It may be when you are pursuing your hobby or your sport. What is it that causes you to be attentive and keep concentration? Learn from that and apply it to your work. In the end, this is your problem and the answer lies with you.
Doctor's prescription: For some, self-discipline is an attitude; for others it is a learnt behaviour. It must be one or the other – it simply cannot be a weakness or a lack in your professional practice. If it is, or continues to be, then you may find yourself with all the time in the world for daydreaming about summer holidays … and very little money to spend on them.
Roger Delves is director of the Ashridge Executive Masters in Management and adjunct professor at Hult International Business School. He is co-author of the book The Top 50 Management Dilemmas: Fast Solutions to Everyday Challenges. Email him at business@thenational.ae for advice on any work issues
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