 Do you feel like you're always distracted? People are always bothering you or your phone's always ringing and you just can't get anything done? We've got some tips for you today. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Distractions are just a part of life. We all have them. We have people in our lives who want to talk to us. They want to do things with us. We have our phones going off. Distractions are everywhere. But the good news is we don't have to let them keep us from doing the things we need to do. And honestly a lot of this stuff, a lot of distractions we do to ourselves. And I'm going to talk about three kinds of distractions and how we can do our part to keep ourselves from being distracted when those distractions are going on in our lives. So the first kind of distraction we run into are people distractions. And these aren't always bad. These are our friends. These are our family. These are the people in our lives who want to talk to us about something or do something or be in our lives with us and help us enjoy our lives. And I will say if the people in your life are distracting you, it may be a sign that you're not taking enough time for yourself. So give that some thought before you start to file this in the category of distraction. Maybe you do need some time for yourself and for your family and friends. However, let's say this really is a distraction. The best way we can deal with our people distractions, our family, our friends who are looking for our time or even some of our coworkers who might be looking for our time, is we just have to make a deal with them. We have to negotiate with them. I used to tell this to my Air War college students in the online program all the time. They would call and say, I just can't get this done. And the advice I would give them and say, look, I know it's hard. But if you can just, if you can just work on this an hour at night, you can get this done in just a few months. Talk to your spouse, talk to your husband or your wife, talk to them about, look, I just need an hour tonight or I just need two hours to work on this tonight. Can you handle the kids? Can you do that from after dinner from 630 to 730? Can you just give me an hour and I'll do this and then I'm all yours for the rest of the night. Negotiate, make a deal. The important thing is we've got to stick up. We've got to live up to our end of the deal here. So if we say an hour, we've got to live up to that hour and show them we mean the our side of the deal as much as we expect them to hold up there under the deal. So try that. If you've got someone in your life who needs your time, legitimately needs your time, but you've got to do something else, make a deal, negotiate with them and live up to your end of the deal. That's distraction. Number one, those very important people distractions in our lives. The second kind of distraction we have in our lives are the unnecessary distractions. These are the things we've done to ourselves as leaders. This is where maybe we haven't honed our leadership skills or followed through on things enough. These are to use a sports analogy. These are the unforced errors of the leadership world that result in our distraction. If you've got your team members coming to you for approval on stuff all the time or to ask you questions, it could be because you haven't delegated enough to them. You haven't given them authority to go make decisions on their own or you haven't set clear expectations. So the trick with this, if you've got your team coming to you all the time, I need help. I have a question. You may just, one, set clear expectations to delegate the, not just the responsibility and the accountability for what they're doing, but the authority to make decisions and be real clear about that when you set expectations. That should cut down on that. And I think we've got a video somewhere in the archive about delegating effective tips for delegating. I'll link that up here so you can just go to that. We don't have to go into all those steps about how to effectively delegate. Side note, open door policies. I don't advise them. A, because someday there's going to be a need for you to shut that door and handle something important and someone's going to be real upset because they wanted to come and they're not going to be upset about the thing they wanted to talk about. They'll be upset because you said you had an open door policy and your door wasn't open when they came to see you. But open door policies are ripe for this kind of distraction. So open door policy, consider strongly whether that's the kind of policy you want to have or not. All right. Last one. Distraction type number three. This is where we distract ourselves. This is where not the leadership things of our team, but the way we distract ourselves. Number one is our phone, right? All those notifications going off in our phone. And I think we're going to do a special video just on electronic distractions coming up here. But put your phone, turn it off, put it in a drawer. My phone's in the other room right now. That's how focused I want to be on this. I don't need any distractions doing these videos as hard enough for me as it is. So put your phone somewhere else. Turn it off, silence it, whatever. Turn your phone off. Don't worry about your social media. Don't worry about comments and likes. If you've got something important to do, get rid of that phone. Now the other thing is a little harder. It's a little more insidious in this type of distraction. It's these human nature things, these things that we let distract us. And a lot of this is either thinking back or forward in time, thinking about past successes, past failures, or the consequences of if this thing that we're working on doesn't go well. And or the successes or if it's going to be successful. And a lot of times we're thinking about the result of something, enjoying the result or worrying about the results of the thing we're working on instead of just doing the work. And honestly, the only cure to this is recognizing it and then doing the work. Taking one step, doing one little step. And then when that step is done, doing the next little step, doing the third little step, and so on. And every time we catch ourselves thinking about the past or the future, just saying, not time to think about that, I got to do the work. I got to do this one step. So those are your three kinds of distractions with the tips on how to solve that, those people distractions, make a deal with them, live up to that deal, those unnecessary, unforced error distractions, delegate to your team, set clear expectations, and set the boundaries if you need to close that door and do some work without the team bothering you. And third, the way we distract ourselves. Get rid of your phone if you've got to work on something important. And two, don't think forward or backward in time. Just focus on the one step you've got to do right now. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, please email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com. We're always happy to ask your questions or leave a comment. We love it when you comment. Please like, comment, and share this with someone you love or someone you work with, and you found this helpful and think this might be helpful to them. We're still doing our Q&As on Friday. I know we didn't do one last week because of a prior commitment, but we're doing Q&As on Fridays. So if you want to do a live Q&A with us and ask about how I have this specific type of distraction, and I really need some help with it. I tried the tips in the video. It didn't work. Please come to our live Q&A and we'll help you out. We'd love to hear from you. Thank you for watching. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.