Selective focusing

It has been a while since my last post. The reason for this is stated in the title itself. Everyone has a lot of tasks to perform, but selectively focusing on the task at hand makes it much easier to handle any kind of workload.

Lately I have taken on workload of other people to try and fill in a gap present and still achieve the deadlines we set forth. This has meant that my workload exploded for a small period of time, doubling in some case tripling for short sprints. 

How do you keep cool and still focus in such situations ? 

I have to admit that up to a couple of years ago, I used to feel agitated and felt it was hard to simply come up with a plan to achieve all the work in a predefined period of time. This was until I realized that there are things that you can control and things that are simply out of your control. Making sure that you do not fight the things you cannot control is the starting point to get any workload out of the way. Once you accept this, selecting focusing is the next step to get the work done.

Every morning I used to make a list of things that I wanted to achieve by the end of the day, gave rough estimates of the time required and made sure it was physically possible. Once I have a plan of action, I isolated myself whenever possible from the outside world (headphones with some music does it for me when I cannot physically isolate myself) and focused solely on the task at hand. Once you get used to this, when you finish a task, you will have to go back to the list since you will be so much in the "zone" that you will not even recall the next task to perform. 

It is a technique which you will acquire with time and it will not always work for every type of work that needs to be done. Still one can see patterns between people who can selectively focus on tasks compared to others that are not used to this, in day to day routine tasks. 

Some people prefer routine and as soon as something external comes into play, it takes them a substantial amount of time to forget about their routine and understand and resolve any non-routine task.  

When you think about it, this really applies to any aspect in life. It applies to any kind of job and also in personal life. At the end this is what the Work-Life balance is all about. The easier you can switch from "Work" to "Life" or vice versa efficiently the more you will feel you are utilizing at best your time and the more accomplished you will feel.