Narrow Your Focus
Narrow Your Focus:
This week’s post will focus on narrowing your focus when you have a To-Do List to complete.
As always, we will begin with three common Mortgage Terms.
Your three Mortgage Term Definitions for this week are:
1) Loan to Value: This is the comparison of the loan amount to the value of the home. For example, if you have a home that is worth 500,000 and you have a mortgage of 400,000 you have a loan to value of 80%.
2) Title: Ownership of a bundle of rights that the owner has in a property. If something is registered “on title” that means it is officially registered against the ownership of the property.
3) Down Payment: The amount of money that the purchaser, or purchasers of a property are putting towards ownership initially (not borrowed funds) towards the total amount for which the property is being purchased.
As always if you need mortgage financing, or have questions about mortgages, you can email arnone.a@mortgagecentre.com call (647) – 966 – 4344 or hit the button to book a consultation.
This week we talk about narrowing your focus. Having a To-Do list is good, it keeps tabs on the tasks you need to complete in order to succeed. Making a To-Do list, even if you have already checked things off the list can boost your confidence, and keep you going, but if you have too long a list, it can have the opposite effect.
This is where narrowing your focus comes in handy. If you highlight your list based on importance, this is one tactic to help you narrow down which things are the most important. Here’s an example. Let’s say you need to pack lunch for work in the afternoon, you need to sweep the floor of your house, you need to call someone back to set something up for an event you’re hosting in a week, and you need to go shopping for groceries.
How would you order these tasks. Some people would say that the easiest ones should be dealt with first. Sweeping the floor doesn’t take too long so I will do that first. Once you have made that decision, highlight it in whichever colour you have selected for highest importance.
It almost doesn’t matter which task you pick. The most important thing to do is pick one and finish it. If you have 10 things on a To-Do list and you get 80% of the way finished on 7 of them, even though you have done a lot of good productive work, you will feel less productive than if you completed four tasks. Unless something has to be done by a certain time, pick one, and stick with it until it is done. Now, this is more easily said than done, but here are three tips that have worked for me when I am struggling with too many things on my To-Do list.
1) Set your phone to Do Not Disturb. As a Mortgage Agent, I am glued to my phone. It is how I connect with clients, Real Estate Agents, or other potential business-related things. However, it can also be a massive distraction when trying to complete a single task. If my phone is always going off, I will want to check it, and I won’t succeed at finishing the task.
2) Set time limits. Break your day down into chunks. If you’ve been following this blog for a few weeks now you know that I always build a To-Do list for the following day the night before. I find this a great way of having an initial plan for the day. Now I want to add to that habit, by setting time limits for things. This works especially well if you have a recurring task that you have to complete. For me this is making sales calls to prospective realtor contacts. I found that I accomplish more by saying, “I will make my sales calls between 8:30 and 9:00 am.” That means that no matter what else I have to do on any given day, between 8:30 and 9:00 I am making sales calls. My work day begins at 7:00 each day, so it also gives me a time frame in which to complete any tasks I know I want to accomplish before my sales call window at 8:30. It works better because you can say well I want to accomplish 3 things before my 8:30 window so I will do “x” from 7:00 – 7:15, “y” from 7:15 – 7:45 and “z” from 7:45-8:15 giving me a 15 minute window before I have to start my sales calls.
3) Take breaks. If you are working on tasks that you know will take a longer time to complete, make sure that you have allotted time for adequate breaks throughout the process. Whether it’s working on a report for work, or going through the one-hundred emails that are clogging your inbox, or folding the mountain of laundry that needs to be put away, make sure you take breaks. This can be 5 minutes outside going for a walk, or getting a cup of coffee, or something as simple as going and splashing some cold water on your face. It doesn’t matter what it is, just do something to break up your time spent on a task.
One of the other most important things is to try and mentally disconnect from the things on your To-Do list. Even for five minutes at a time. It doesn’t matter if you’re not physically performing a task, whether it’s for work or life, but if you’re constantly thinking about it, stressing about it, or obsessing over it, you are not relaxing. Relaxing and recharging our physical and mental batteries is crucial for our mindset.
Narrowing your focus to one or two tasks at a time, will help you complete more tasks in a shorter time frame, and keep you in that positive frame of mind. Having that positive outlook on things is one of the most powerful things in the world. It doesn’t matter what you are doing. Whether you are in sales, making calls to prospective clients, you’re trying to improve yourself in some way, or you’re just simply overwhelmed with the crazy rollercoaster we call life, doing things that help you stay in a positive frame of mind can be so crucial to staying on the successful path.
As always, we end with a book recommendation. No podcast for this week. The book recommendation for this week is “Discipline is Destiny” by Ryan Holiday.
Thank you for reading this, and if you’ve found any of this helpful, please consider recommending it to a family member or a friend who may find it helpful as well. Of course, these are simply the things that I have found work for me, they may not aways work for you. Or some of them will but others won’t. Even if all it does is point you on the path towards a more positive mindset, then it has been a success. If you are interested in subscribing to the weekly Mindset Newsletter which includes snippets from upcoming blog posts email arnone.a@mortgagecentre.com with the subject line “Mindset Blog”