For 30 minutes every Monday morning, we have a Habañero wide meeting to bring everyone up to speed on important news, accomplishments, and upcoming milestones for projects and initiatives from around the company. An important part of these meetings is the “Purpose” topic – intended to bring our values, purpose, and vision into context.

I hosted today’s meeting and here is my Olympics inspired Purpose topic:

Purpose – Achievement, in spite of distractions

I was at the women’s curling match last night. It was the first time I’d ever been to watch curling and I was really struck by the level of distraction that the players face: a relatively small venue packed with 5,000 fans. The noise in there, with everyone cheering, feet stomping on the aluminum stands, cowbells, and noisemakers was intense. With three games going on in parallel, there are six teams playing at the same time – and although Canada had the most fans, there was a substantial and loud contingent of American, Chinese, Swiss, and Japanese fans. So, the Americans would score a point in their game and building would erupt just as a Canadian player was concentrating on delivering an important shot in the next game over.

It was amazing to me how the players could seemingly block out all of the noise, the visual distraction from the crowd doing the wave around the rink, and the other games happening on either side of them and just stay focused on their own game and making their shots.

From 2010-Olympics

In our line of work, the distractions are different. There aren’t usually 5,000 people cheering when we’re trying to do our work; however, we do still have many distractions bombarding us: emails, phone calls, instant messages, news, other things on our mind – there’s no shortage of distractions in our work day.

There are certainly some things we can do to help minimize distractions: things like turning off email notifications, putting on headphones, and taking advantage of quiet time; however, just like the curlers at the rink, there are many distractions that we don’t have control over and can’t eliminate. In order to still perform well and achieve in spite of these distractions, we need to have a really clear focus on our most important objective. This allows us to ignore all of the other distractions on concentrate on what we need to do to achieve that objective.

The players in the curling game are able to block out all of the distractions from the crowd and the other games going on around them because they have a very clear objective they are working towards. The most important objective for them is making the shots they need to score points. Everything else is less important at that particular time.

So in our own workday, let’s think about what our most important objective is for the day. What’s the single most important thing I need to achieve today to be successful in my work? Keeping that top of mind will help filter out all of the other distractions that come up and keep me focused on the right tasks.

Have a great week!