President Eisenhower once said, "The urgent problems are seldom the important ones." This statement remains very true even in today’s context. In the current digital era, life is much more complex, fast-paced, urgent, and demanding than ever before.

Further, the digital age has placed so much information at our fingertips and at the click of a button that it is difficult to focus on something without getting distracted. If you have worked on a document for an hour, you must have felt the urge to go online and inform your friends on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter how you enjoy every minute of your writing. You may also feel the tingling urge to catch up with some news or browse through websites during a conference call. Coupled with these distractions is the temptation to respond to that beep on your mobile phone or tablet, alerting you to a message waiting or an update on one of your favourite apps.

Given this urgency and sense of distraction, how do you remain on top of your priorities? In these busy times, conflicting priorities confront the average person almost throughout the day — whether a professional working in the office, a lawyer, or even a scriptwriter. How you handle your day-to-day priorities has become a top issue for many employees and managers today. Missed deadlines, abandoned personal goals, a fuming boss, and an irate customer are all downsides of being unable to keep pace. This leads to more and more accumulated actions, and you could end up with a Himalayan task of prioritising and re-prioritising. What would help is to step back and review your to-do list. Just having one does not guarantee you will progress well on the tasks to be completed. Will you aim to be effective or efficient in the process?

Here are a few things you can do to make the most of the avalanche of items on your to-do list. These simple suggestions will soon make you more efficient, improving overall performance and reducing urgency or stressful moments.

a) Pareto to the Rescue: Use the 80:20 principle to segregate your pending items into the vital few and the trivial many. Pick the top 3 to 5 things you want to sort as key priorities among the many awaiting your action. Call them your Top Priority Actionables. Remember, the key is that it is not enough to know what to do; you also need to know what not to do.

b) Use those ever-increasing Constellations of Apps: Be it Android or iOS, you will find dozens of planning tools and to-do lists that can help you with alerts, alarms, and reminders. Put these Top Priorities into the calendar and keep coasting along as you finish them individually. For the technologically uninitiated, the daily diary or planner sheet can come in handy.

c) Distance Yourself from Those Digital Distractions: You need to put away these distractions like the WhatsApp message waiting to be read, the latest Tweet from your rock star hero, the latest weather update, or the email from the office, all arriving incessantly into your digital device. Keep a time window for such activity and stick to it. If you follow that routine, it starts getting ingrained in your mind; in a few weeks, the subconscious subsystem of the mind learns to rewire the brain circuit.

d) Make Time for Reflection: In the hurry and pace of daily life, we rarely stop to look back on the days gone by. It would be a good idea to look at how you fared in your daily activities. You would need no more than 5 to 8 minutes, and this exercise also helps you identify any priority items that you may have to focus on the next day. The human mind has an uncanny ability to tune out what is not in focus, and one could easily avoid missing something that might fall between the no-light hours that separate the two days.

e) Use the Eisenhower Matrix to your Advantage: Use the two-way matrix plotted with urgency and importance as the two dimensions. Group all your pending tasks into one of the four boxes and handle them as follows:

• Urgent & Important: Should be your Priority 1. Act on them first;
  
  

• Urgent & Not Important: Park them or pass them to others who can do them without risk of any kind;
  
  

• Not Urgent & Important: Schedule them as Priority 2;
  
  

• Not Urgent & Not Important: Delete them from your list.
  
  

You can use this matrix to plan your personal tasks or those at work. It’s a perfect way of not only ensuring you focus on immediate priorities but also helps give you clarity on how to free up some of your time for other, more important things.

f) Delegate and Outsource when Possible: Not every task that comes across our plate needs to be done by us. If there are things that others in our circle or team can do, such tasks are good candidates to delegate. While you delegate things to others, you also free up your time for more strategic things that need more of your focus and attention. When delegating, it’s always important to consider the ability of the person to complete that task efficiently and without much struggle.

Making Sense of the Distractions?

Do you have too many things going on simultaneously? It is said that people who multitask are more likely to make mistakes. This is due to context switching, which leads to reduced attention. However, it is not impossible to handle more than one task — people can be trained and improve to be more efficient at switching tasks to a limited extent. Still, they improve only after repeated and rigorous practice and training.

There are downsides to effectiveness when we multitask. So try to focus on tasks one at a time. The brain needs to refocus as you switch between tasks, making use of mental energy. This leads us back to making a priority list and re-examining what’s important and what’s not before you race ahead.

Therefore, think about it carefully when you are overwhelmed by a long list of to-do items next time. Instead of jumping straight in to address them in parallel and ending up overwhelmed, you can look at the various ways to manage as distilled in this article. Remember that efficiency and the choice to move from being overwhelmed to being organised are in our hands.

Finally, you may have become an expert over the years in overcoming digital distractions and may already be using and applying what has been discussed here. However, true success comes only when all hands are on board in sync. You cannot succeed if you are focused and undistracted but your team cannot overcome these distractions. In a follow-up article, I will address how to lead in a distracted world and thereby help your team stay focused too.