One Million and Beyond

Maintaining Focus

By Matt - Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

The past couple weeks have been incredibly busy for me with the closing of our new house and the existing one coming close together there has been a lot of extra activities added to my plate. I’ve tried maintaining everything with a bit of grace and perseverance. I’ve found that whenever there’s a large project or many projects you simply have to break them down into smaller parts and take it a small part at a time.

Being that I’ve worked in project management for a while breaking down a project into manageable parts is necessary and it translates pretty much to every aspect of our lives. For example if you’re $40,000 in debt paying the whole thing off at once might seem like a huge undertaking. That by itself is enough to scare people into inactivity. But taking that same large number and breaking it down over say 3 years means its only $13,333 per year (or a little over $1,100 per month) which is still pretty daunting. Understanding this we can stretch the project over a longer period to make it more manageable, say within 5 years (about $667 per month).

Breaking down our goals and projects can make them more achievable but in my opinion it adds something additional that’s important, it adds focus. Each of the small pieces by themselves might not seem like a grand achievement but when you start adding them up they can very quickly make a huge difference. This is exactly what I’ve been doing preparing everything for the impending move and its been working wonders in helping me keep focused which we all know can be tough from time to time.

Subscribe to this Feed

---