We live in a world of constant distraction, driven by our Fear Of Missing Out.
We can’t bear being separated from our devices, constantly diverting our attention to their vibrations, beeps, and alerts. We spend more time looking at the small screen than we do looking at the world around us.
We spend endless time in meetings, but we actually aren’t present. As a result we have to schedule another meeting, at which we still aren’t present. Then we muse about why we aren’t making the progress we hoped to make.
We fail to make progress in our daily “to-do” lists (if we even have them), constantly being diverted by the latest email, voicemail, text. Our well planned day falls apart because of the constant interruptions we allow to drive our priorities.
We “buckle down to work,” yet we have dozens of tabs open on our computers. We jump from tab to tab, and back, unless diverted by the alert that keep popping up in the lower right corner of our screens.
We worry about missing out, so we respond immediately, even though, unless you are an emergency services operator, an immediate response is not required.
We have trained each other to be driven by interruption, so we are surrounded by a network of people, that are continually diverted from their goals and displaced priorities. Networked FOMA snowballs to mass distraction.
We confuse busyness and activity with making progress and producing results.
We measure our importance by how full our calendars are and how many meetings we participate in.
We are consumed by our “sales stack,” thinking we are being efficient, not realizing we aren’t being effective.
We aggressively build our networks and our connections, but we really aren’t any more connected.
We are so afraid of missing out, we don’t realize we really are…..
The data surrounds us, yet we ignore it. Year after year of declining sales performance. Year after year of missed goals.
If you buy Mike Weinberg’s #SalesTruth for nothing more than his discussion about our FOMO (though he doesn’t call it that), and the importance of disciplined time blocking, you will get huge value! But there is so much more.
Don’t miss out!
