In these economic times, maintaining your focus, being disciplined and strong commitment are more critical than ever. Do you ever find yourself becoming distracted? Do you ever find yourself:

• doing work that could be done after hours?
• avoiding the work you must do now?
• taking more breaks?
• pretending to do work but, in reality, it won’t generate revenue?
• marketing rather than selling?
• responding to emails rather than making calls?
• taking put-offs instead of using proven sales tactics?
• making social calls instead of purpose-driven sales calls?
• scheduling feel-good lunches instead of lunches with potential customers and clients?
• emailing jokes instead of follow ups?
• browsing web sites instead of researching your next potential customer?

Do the distractions pull you away from your work or does the boredom, difficulty, or emotional strain of the work push you to distraction?

You can only be disciplined when you can maintain your focus. It’s important to identify the root cause of any tendency you have to become distracted. Try tracking it for a week:

• How many times?
• What did you find yourself doing?
• How long were you distracted?
• What pulled or pushed you away?

The best way to do this is to set up a spreadsheet with the following columns:

• Start Time
• End Time
• Sales Activity
• Description
• Outcome

Then add columns for the four distractions above. At the end of the week, answer these questions:

How focused was I? (1-5)
How distractible was I? (1-5)
Did I improve as the week progressed (1-5)

1 – Pitiful
2 – Need significant Improvement
3 – Room for Improvement
4 – Need Fine Tuning
5 – Perfect

Then, make a commitment to being more disciplined about your focus. The distractions may not go away, but your reaction to those distractions should. Avoid the temptation to follow the distractions and remain committied and disciplined about maintaining your focus.