Fighting Drift

If you wanted to be in a good mood at work, would you turn down the lights, pull the curtains, and then try to read a mountain of material?

If you wanted to be highly productive in the course of a day, would you gobble junk food or go on a starvation diet?

If you wanted to reduce the amount of stress, would you refrain from canceling unnecessary meetings and then scurry about with no sense of priorities?

The answer is obvious but the action may not match it. The old key question - "What am I doing here?" - needs to be asked several times a day if we are to protect ourselves from slipping into harmful behavior. (Confession: I am far from innocent in this area.) The question is often treated as a macro issue and saved for company retreats but it is equally helpful on a micro scale.

"What am I doing over the next 30 minutes?" and then the next 30 minutes and so on can break the tendency to drift into counter-productive activities. As productivity consultant David Allen has noted, focusing on "next actions" makes more sense than staring at the projects that are the result of those actions but which are impossible to attack as a whole.

The ability to be in the moment, focus on the immediate, and understand what you are doing and permitting to be done brings a surge of life that any amount of drift can never resemble.