Our brains have become attuned to the beeps, chirps and buzzes of a world that competes for our attention and it can be difficult to find focus. But it’s increasingly imperative that we learn to recalibrate our focus if we want to live purposefully.
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We move by line of sight. Where our eyes focus, our body will follow. And where we focus our time and energy, our lives will follow.
What’s in your line of sight?
If you’d like to catch a glimpse of what your future will look like, just open your calendar. Where is your line of sight today, this week, this month and this quarter? Have you filled it with purposeful events? Does it tell your story?
And what about your list of “to dos?” Is it a haphazard list of tasks to be checked off at the end of the day, or is it pointing you at an intentional and purposeful outcome?
The things that you spend your time on are an indication of what’s important to you. How do you fill your minutes? Are you in reaction mode, or are you proactively building? Are you working on your business or are you working in it? Are you focused on the urgent or on the important?
If you don’t fill your time, someone else will. And when your line of sight is continually being disrupted by external influences, it can be difficult to get anywhere on purpose. You become about as effective as a dog living in a squirrel infested neighborhood. Just as you cast your focus on one squirrel and take chase, you catch sight in your peripheral vision of another, and then another, and then another, and your course becomes a series of detours, each taking you further from your destination.
“Keep your eyes straight ahead; ignore all sideshow distractions. Watch your step, and the road will stretch out smooth before you.” –Proverbs 4:25What if, instead of being a keeper of events, your calendar became your working roadmap for a purposeful life? And, what if your list of “to-dos” became less about tasks and more about results and achievement?
At Service Express, we know that employees don’t want to show up for a paycheck alone. They want to know that what they do matters.
We believe that if we help our employees get what they want out of life, then they’ll help our company, and our customers get what they want. And it’s worked well for us.
To that end, we try to provide them with tools to help them calibrate their focus and build their line of sight. But we know that the tools that we’ve developed- our Vision goals, Scorecards, ROIs and 5/15s– are just that, tools. Our employees will get out of them no more than what they put into them. If they treat them as a simple method to manage tasks and measure performance, then that’s exactly what they’ll do. But if they use them as tools to build their roadmap and focus their line of sight, then our employees, our company, and our customers are better for it.
It begins, and ends, with where we focus our time and energy. If we don’t intentionally calibrate our focus, we will never catch that squirrel that we so desperately desire!
How do you manage your line of sight?
