Recently, talking with a friend of mine, he told me of a question he posed to many people. What is your philosophy in life? His was straightforward, but another one he relayed from a friend was “what’s important right now?”
This brought up the related thought that to do anything well, to master it, you have to truly focus on it. What you are doing is what’s important right now, until it’s time to do something else, and you should pour yourself into it 100%.
Then it hit me that one side-effect of time-management and task-management systems like the Franklin Covey planners, “Getting Things Done“, and “Autofocus,” wasn’t just to manage your time, but to allow you to focus on the priorities at hand. Writing down what needs to be done and filing it in a way that the tasks will pop up when it’s the time or place to do them allows you to stop worrying or thinking about what you need to remember or may be forgetting, and makes it easier to focus on the job at hand.
I had never considered it from the standpoint of applying focus to achieve mastery of a process or skill. Not only do they let you know what commitments you can make, and what needs to be done, but you can leverage the time spent in organizing your life to get what you’re doing done even quicker by taking advantage of the opportunity to focus on “what’s important right now.”
Just a thought.