HELP! I Need to Focus

One day on my way to work I whispered a prayer to heaven.

My request?

Focus.

I need to learn how to focus and I need to learn in a hurry. Right now, as I’m writing this post there are eight browser widows open on my laptop, and I don’t even want to count the number open on my iPhone or my iPad. That doesn’t include the two MS Word documents I have open, as well. And please don’t make me confess to you the number of documents in progress and apps open on my iPad, right now. Pretty please.

My husband logged on to use my laptop one day and just got straight flustered because of all the stuff I had open. In my mind, I keep it all open for a reason. There’s usually some article I’ve stumbled across to which I plan to circle back. And usually I do circle back…eventually. In the meantime, I’m jumping back and forth from one website to the next. Heaven forbid I find a link that looks interesting within an article I’m reading. Then I go sliding down a rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland.

The same pattern rears its ugly mug in my daily routine in other ways. On any given clean-up day,  it’s not uncommon for me to look around to discover kitchen cabinets and a dishwasher open from where I was unloading dishes, but for some reason I stopped and started washing clothes. Meanwhile the clothes from the dryer are on the bed. I was folding those when I went to the bathroom to put in fresh towels. Next thing you know I’m cleaning the tub. By night fall, I lay my head to the pillow, and it takes me HOURS to fall asleep. Why? Because now I’m filled with anxiety from the overload of information and activity I’ve encountered and equally stressed from the fact I’ve accomplished nothing. Nada. ZILCH.

And tomorrow, if the good Lord wills, I awake and the cycle starts all over again. Bottom line is I have trouble picking one thing and completing it before starting another project. That often leads to accomplishing absolutely nothing or accomplishing something very, very slowly.

So the morning I prayed the prayer begging the Lord to help me get focused, I was fresh off another night of minimal sleep (if any) and I was desperate. I mean, I don’t drink caffeinated anything, people. When I’m tired, I’m STUCK! Not a good feeling. Later that day, I picked up my cell phone and scrolled through my twitter feed. When I read the words: How to Focus in an Age of Distraction: 10 Things to do Before you Click all I could do was shake my head and whisper “thank you Jesus.”

It was a blog post by Ann Voskamp – author of the New York Times bestseller One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. If you are not familiar with Ann Voskamp, you can learn more about her by clicking here. I was so thankful to read her post, I immediately decided I had to share it with you all. So if you’re anything like me and feeling the need to become a bit more focused, I encourage you to click here and take a few minutes to check out Ann’s suggestions in this post. If you’re not as scatter-brained as I can be, then woopty doo for you! No seriously, though, it’s always nice to share good information with someone you know who can use it. So feel free to forward this post. Maybe those you forward it to and I can start some type of focus group. Get it? Focus group. Oh never mind.

Until next time…

Coming up at Be Completely You….. An interview with national youth motivational speaker and sex education expert Jackie Brewton in conjunction with The National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. Don’t miss it.