Focused Thinking – a Must for Every Business
Devoting 15 minutes a day for dedicated thinking on how to expand your business and how to increase value to your customers, will transform your business.
You may be thinking, I’m so busy, I’m not able to devote time to thinking. There are two main reasons why you want to dedicate the time.
Benefit 1
First, this dedicated thinking is an important way to help you move your business ahead. Focused thinking on:
- how to serve your customers better
- additional products or services that can help solve your customers problems
- ways to provide for the needs of your customers. Generating ideas to solve these needs and wants that create additional income.
Generating these ideas does not come to you during the hustle and bustle of the day. Your brain does not have an on/off switch. It takes time to develop promising ideas and this can be easier when you dedicate focused thinking time.
Benefit 2
Dedicating time to Focused thinking on a consistent basis will lead to more and better ideas. You mind is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes. Daniel Goleman, the originator of Emotional Intelligence, in his book, Focus, says that your mind creates pathways when you think. The more you focus on a topic and think about it, the stronger the pathways become.
Why Our Mind Wanders
You may find when you first try to do focused thinking, your mind will wander, and you’ll constantly need to bring it back to the subject. Often your mind will start thinking about what must be done today – the urgent. Many people after a few minutes of their mind drifting will give up trying to focus their mind and get on with their day. Don’t let that happen to you.
Why does our mind wander?
According to the National Science Foundation, we have as many as 50,000 thoughts in a day, so it is natural for our minds to wander with so many ideas thrashing about in our heads. Part of that 50,000 thoughts are the recent development of social media and the distraction it creates. We are constantly checking our Facebook page or the latest tweets. If our phone chimes with a text, we drop everything and look at the text.
Have you ever seen your teenagers studying for an exam and the TV is blaring in the background? Have you ever had a conversation with someone while they are reading texts or scrolling social media? Cal Newport talks about in Deep Work how we are teaching our minds to be easily distracted; easily bored. We crave outside stimulation for our minds. We are teaching our mind to be lazy.
Method for Productive Thinking time
So how do you go about creating productive thinking time?
First, determine how much time you want to set aside for this. Initially, I would recommend keeping the time fairly short; 15-20 minutes. Set a timer for yourself so you aren’t wondering how long you have been at it. If you try to do a longer time than that, you will be longing for the timer to go off. It will be pure torture. Why? Because deep thinking is hard work. Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work, talks about how productive we can be with focused thinking, but after 4 hours of deep thinking we are exhausted and need to regenerate. And people are only able to do this 4 hours of deep thinking after they have trained themselves to do. Training your brain to be able to think is no different than training for a marathon. You don’t attempt 10 miles today having never ran more than 2 blocks in your life. You start small and build upon it.
Productive Thinking Environment
Find a quiet place to focus on your thinking. Early in the morning, when the house is quiet, would be a good time to do this. If you are not a morning person, you’ll need to find the right time of day that works for you and set aside that time for your thinking. (For the rest of the blog post I’ll assume you are doing this first thing in the morning). Find comfortable chair (have a favorite chair to do your thinking). If you don’t have comfortable chair, get one. You want to have an inviting environment.
Second, start with your favorite beverage. Tim Ferriss, an entrepreneur extraordinaire, has a beverage blend of black and green tea, or Pu-erh tea, ember, or Kabuse Sencha).
For me, I love the smell of coffee. I will often get several types of coffee, just to have a variety of coffee smells, first thing in the morning.
Do not allow any distractions in your Productive Thinking Time. Don’t start your day with emails, texts, social media or anything else. Don’t let the phone chimes, or buzzes distract you. Make sure they are turned off. Michael Hyatt, another entrepreneur, sets up his computer so he is not able to get on Facebook or Twitter at the start of the morning. The key is to do whatever it takes to not be distracted.
How to do Focused Thinking?
First, determine what are you trying to solve. Write down a problem you’re trying to solve. Not a day to day item (such as how to handle a slow pay client), but rather something like, “how to increase sales 10% in the next 3 months”. We’ll use this as an example.
Next, Write out the problem. As you can tell by the way the example is stated, increasing sales by 10% in 3 months is a goal. It is concrete in what you want to achieve, and it is stated in the positive. We’ll discuss in a moment why the way it is stated is important.
List 10 ideas/ways you could achieve the 10% increase in sales.
What are the new products or services that can increase the dollars spent per existing customer? What are ten products or services that can be created for a new target market? I go into details on how to determine a target market and develop products/services for the target market in my article, “7 Keys to starting your Business Right”. My subscribers get a free copy of the guide. To subscribe, Click on the subscribe button at the bottom of the main web page and get your free copy!
You can do this thinking with pencil and paper or computer. Use whatever method works best with your thinking. The 10 ideas will likely take up your 15-20 minutes, but don’t stop your thinking until you come up with 10 ideas.
You are now done for the morning. But you are not done for the day.
By the way, as you go through the day, ideas may pop in your head; make sure you capture them. Apps on Smart phones can be used to capture ideas. I normally record my idea via texts to myself.
Wanna do your Best thinking? Slept on It
Albert Einstein said, “never go to sleep without a question to your subconscious”.
Before you go to bed, ask yourself a question or two, related to your morning thinking. Or in the case of Josh Waitzkin, life coach and expert chess player, prefers to ask the questions of his subconscious after dinner. He finds if he does this right before bed, his conscious mind focuses on the question while he is trying to get to sleep, making sleep difficult.
Take one of the ideas you wrote down during your morning thinking. Take that idea and ask yourself:
- How can I tie this (product or service) to the existing product line?
- How can I find time/money for this new product or service?
- How can I make this product/service so that customers absolutely love it?
State the questions in the positive and use the present tense. The reason you state the questions in the positive is your subconscious is not able to deal with negative ideas (e.g. I must not eat fast food). If I told myself not to eat fast food, my subconscious hears “eat fast food”. In the middle of the day I would receive a prompting to eat fast food. Once you have done this, let your subconscious mind go to work.
The Next Morning
Write out a statement as to why each of the 10 ideas will work to increase your sales by 10% in the next 3 months. Focus on what the problem/issue/product will provide your customer and do so from your customer’s perspective.
As you are writing out the statement, your subconscious may prompt you with thoughts concerning the 10 ideas from yesterday. Write down those thoughts. Evaluate your 10 ideas. If you are not able to write a reason as to why the idea helps the customer, just note that move to the next idea.
Once you are done with your statements on the original ten, write down another 10 ideas on how to increase sales 10% in the next 3 months. You may need to generate a hundred ideas before you hit upon a good one.
Generating 10 ideas a day will mean 50 ideas per week. Think about. Fifty ideas a week to move your business ahead. Fifty ideas every week for fifty weeks and that is 2500 ideas to move your business ahead. Focused thinking will indeed change your life.
“Daily 10” lists
Above is one way of thinking to move your business forward. James Altucher, a best-selling author, uses various “10 lists” to help him think creatively. Below is a sample from Tim Ferriss’s book Tools of Titans.
- 10 old ideas I can make new
- 10 ridiculous things I would invent
- 10 books I could write
- 10 people I can send ideas to
- 10 industries where I can remove the middleman
Action:
- How can you change your schedule to free up 15-20 minutes in the morning for Focused Thinking?
- How can you remind yourself to ask a question of your subconscious before going to bed (Hint: Smartphone alarm).
- What challenge in your business, if you solved it, would have a significant impact?