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I have a severe case of ADD. If I’m not doing a thousand things at a time, I feel the strong need to find more stuff to do. However, this is a really bad trait and I’m working really hard to change it. These are three short stories of how my lack of focus undermined my success.

My Video Production Company
A lot of our clients needed videos made so I decided to start a video production company. The plan was always to partner with a professional video producer, but I wanted to learn more about the industry, so I started reading books, taking classes on video editing and analyzing our competition.

Two weeks later I lost a really big client in my main business (my Internet marketing agency) because I completely neglected her and she didn’t give me a second chance. I lost a $15,000/month contract for wasting time learning skills I didn’t even need.

So I decided to let my partner run the business and I now send him clients. I still own half of the business, but I spend only an hour a week working on it. Is it making as much money as it would if I were running it full time? Probably not, but you only have so many hours a day and you have to use them in whatever moves you farthest toward your goal.

Training Our New Salesman
In January we got a lot of great leads so we decided to hire a new salesperson. I normally spend two months training every new hire, but I had a lot on my plate at that moment and only spent two weeks with him.

His performance was less than impressive and I realized it was because I didn’t spend enough time training him. Sales was our top priority at that point and I was spending zero time working on it. Stupid, right? If something is your top priority, you’d think that’s what you’d spend most of your time on, right?

I decided to delegate a bunch of smaller tasks and focus on training my new hire. His closing ratio doubled in only three weeks.

Traveling Around Asia
When I was 20 I was running an e-learning company and traveling around Asia at the same time. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, as I travel a lot, but I didn’t have good systems in place or a good team that could take care of things while I was gone.

I couldn’t enjoy my trip because I was constantly worried about work and my company wasn’t growing because I wasn’t focused on it. Looking back at this, I should have created great systems and hired one or two great employees, train them for a while and slowly transition out of the company.

I tried to do two things at once and didn’t do either one well.

Do you struggle with staying focused, too? Would you mind sharing how you deal with it?