See title above.

Do you ever feel this way? I do, a lot. I’m sure most of us do.

The reason for this is you are working on things that don’t directly contribute to your tasks you want to accomplish. It is easy to get caught up in a flurry of emails, meetings, and phone calls, leaving no time for the big, important projects you actually need to tackle.

Here’s what I did to try and address this. First of all, make a to-do list of all the things you need to accomplish, then prioritize. Now here’s a valuable tip…you don’t need to prioritize the whole thing. Just pick the top three to five things that you REALLY need to get done. If there’s one specific thing, even better. Pick that one.

Now, here’s the important part. When your day starts, commit to completing this one task, no matter what other distractions come your way. Even as you get pulled away with other things, in all your in-between time only focus on that one task.

It might seem like only finishing one task is not accomplishing anything, but actually finishing a task is way better than making no progress at all. And then at the end of the week you’ll look back and realize you actually probably accomplished three or four tasks!

So give it a try. Pick that one thing a day, and do your best to focus on only that one thing. Then even if your day was “super busy” with all those emergencies and distractions, you can look back and realize you are actually making progress with your to-do list.