In the moment

You know the saying ‘work smart, not hard’? Yeah….I need to work on that.

Logically, I know that’s how I should work. I know that I need to learn to be more mindful in everything that I do. I know that I need to sit down and pay more attention and focus and be more ‘in the moment’, but I haven’t figured out HOW to do that yet.

I know that I make excuses for this. I’m too busy, I’m too tired, I’m overwhelmed with too much to do. I don’t’ have to drop everything that I am doing in THAT moment to do what one person asks of me. And I find that I am doing this a lot at work. In many cases, it is very much because of the excuses that I mentioned above. I am doing the job of two, sometimes three people on any given day. I can spend some days running up and down the stairs far more than I am at my desk. And I can have so many things land on my desk at once that I have to leave myself notes about other things that have to be done, outside of my ‘to-do’ list.

It’s in those moments that I need to FOCUS. Yes, that deserves all caps. I need to learn how to finish one task before moving on to another…..I know what happens when I do that. I know that I become distracted and forget where I was and lose my train of thought and spend more time getting back to it than I would have spent finishing it in the first place.

How do we get into these habits……and more importantly, how do we get out? I know the answer to that of course. You make a decision, and you do it. Because no one is going to monitor this and keep me on track but me. Clearly I am not someone that is just naturally good at this type of thing. So I think I need a trigger……..a reminder to stay in the moment. There are few times when I can do that easily, like when I’m cooking…….I may not be paying attention to my hand chopping those vegetables, my mind may wander, but I am smelling the peppers and onions and spices and the bacon cooking and tasting the saltiness of the cheese and the lightness of the whipped butter. I am experiencing all of those things IN THE MOMENT, even if I’m not actively focussed on them. Which puts me one step closer to where I think I need to be. Now what I need is to figure out how to transfer that ability over to all the other areas of my life, both work and personal.

Because I? Truly do suck at it. Case in point: I stopped writing this post once to cruise the Interwebs. For about 5.2 seconds I wandered off because I thought about what I had turned away from doing for no good reason…..to do the very thing that I was writing about in the first place. Which I guess proves to me that I can do it……..but can I do it consistently?

I think maybe the best thing I can do for now is start small. Stay in the moment in conversations, actively listen, taste completely and be more in tune with everything. I truly believe that this is somewhat self-inflicted and somewhat a product of the world we live in………….and maybe I just need to post this, and come back and read it every now and again when I find myself off-track and going in too many directions at once.