How do you manage to get not distracted??

I use a whiteboard.

I have on that whiteboard the basic information about everything I am working on.

Whenever I do research, I put the information that comes out of that research in the proper place on the whiteboard.

Every so often - once every month or so - I go over the whiteboard and erase everything I'm not going to do. Then I reorganise it, moving the stuff I want to do from wherever it is to some prominent location in order of importance.

In the end, I've got this to-do list in the top left corner of the board, and after a while stuff stops gathering notes. That means research is done. So I sit down and make the product.

Here, too, I develop boilerplate. I have a basic layout for all my ebooks, and all the hard work is already done. When I sit down to write a product, it comes out of the gate with about seven pages already written and all I have to do is add the important stuff.

I also try to make my products in one sitting. They seem to get done more often that way, instead of sitting around 80% finished on my hard drive like Pyro Traffic Power and Info Product Blaster.

Like many others, you suffer from Overchoice. And that's not merely a beginner's problem, it's one that affects people with an entrepreneurial spirit in general. So many options, so many ideas!

In the end, there is only one thing you can do. Be strong, force yourself at all costs to focus. Put the new ideas away and come back to them once your current idea has been developed and implemented. You should always have more than one thing in the pipeline, but not more than one thing at the same time, or your pipeline gets blocked.

Good luck to you!

Allen

I have this same problem too. It's a wonderful problem...a terrible gift. I get a ton of ideas, the more I ignore them, the more they invade and sometimes intrude. Recently, i've been getting them in my sleep so much It forced me to go buy some domain names and get started on these projects or they would just pile up and torment me. But the problem is I have so many balls in the air and I've never been good at juggling. But now it's time for me to reign in my focus again. Good thread! I need all the advice on this problem that I can get...

Create a flow chart to hang up on your wall, and whenever you get distracted, follow the chart, and continue where you left off at.

Sometimes distraction helps with the creative part, and you can come up with even better ideas, make sure you capture the original ideas, and what you were planning to do, but always explore those distractions, unless its something like the wife asking you to clean up after you!

Staying on task is really only hard if you don't make a consisous decision ahead of time to just do what needs to be done.

If you just get on the internet and start going, you have no chance of staying focused and on task. You need some system to help you manage yourself.

When I was 14 or so and my dad gave me the old "birds and bee's talk, he said something pretty wise. he said "You can't make the decision about whether to be sexually active when your in the back seat of a car".

The point is that if you just get online and start "working", you are almost certainly not going to make the most discipline and logical decisions "in the heat of the moment".

You need a plan before you get started.

Yikes. I can't imagine having to do as much paperwork to not get distracted as some people seem to. That would be distracting!:rolleyes:

I keep two pads. On one is my to-do list for the day. Nothing gets added to it unless everything is scratched off. The other pad I just jot notes if I think of something. A quick note, then a review of notes later. If anything needs immediate attention it goes on the next day's to-do list.

Of course, there's always the emergency addition here and there -- such as today I have to find a new tire for my rig. That's coming out of my fun time and I'm not a happy camper about it, but stuff happens.

Other than that kind of thing, I don't even understand how people get so distracted they can't do what they know is a priority.

I don't. I get distracted all the time.

And my concentration, memory and attention-span are all really poor, too.

I can concentrate (within reason) and remember what I'm doing while it's in front of me, reasonably well, but as soon as I'm distracted (or as soon as I distract myself, which I do regularly because my attention-span is bad), it's gone.

So I use the same sort of system Sal and Caliban have described: I write everything down. I don't have a whiteboard or anything, but a mixture of notes and lists on what you'd call "big legal pads" (of which I get through many!) and stuff on the computer, with notes on the pad about what to find where on the computer.

Without assiduously doing that, I'd achieve almost nothing.

I manage to get distracted all the time (I'm on Facebook right now, as I'm typing this).
All I can say is that you should even out time spent on work and time spent on other things.

I do the same like you sometimes , I think the problem is what you plan is not good enough..it looks good in the beginning but then you loose interest you have to stick there and continue what you been doing from the start.

good luck

So true, I can so relate to this!

I believe having a mentor is also a good way to avoid being distracted. Someone to guide you, teach you, nuture you and keep you from being distracted.
Sometimes, we need that extra little bit of push from somebody as well as a model to follow and duplicate without subjecting to anything else in between.

This works for me, but your mileage may vary.

I use my iPad as my production machine, and the apps Index Cards, Simple Mind (mind mapping), and Instapaper (saves articles for you) to gather all of my research and to organize it.

Also, a note on strategy: I set myself a time limit for research.

sometimes you just have to use you willpower, but it gets easier if you practice it for a few days