To do, or not to do? The question of focus

Sometimes the simplest questions are the most enlightening. When it comes to achieving a laser focus on the most critical things we need to do, the problem is not usually what “to do”, but rather what “not to do”.

Focus is critical to getting results in just about any undertaking. Yet, if you’re anything like me, staying focused on the most critical things is a constant battle. So many things compete for our time, our energy, our thought. Even when I start my day with a clear plan and set of focused objectives, I still find myself struggling to keep other things from consuming my day.

There is so much talk about the importance of focus, and rightfully so. When we spread our attention across many things, we dilute our impact, take much longer to finish things, and spend way too much time spinning back up to speed on tasks we set aside in the past.

Knowing where to focus our limited time and energy, is important, for sure. But I find that this is not usually what prevents me from completing those few, critical things my business, or my family, or my relationships need. I usually know where I should be concentrating my energy, and I think most of us usually do. Don’t you have a pretty clear sense of what are the two or three most important things you need to focus on to improve your business? To strengthen your health? To advance your career? Or, to improve your relationships? I’m betting you do.

What really makes it difficult for me to achieve that laser focus we all want, is deciding what you’re going to drop or stop doing in order to make the time available to do the few most critical things. I’ve been dealing with this lately, and faced a specific instance of a more general problem we all face. One of the things I know I need to do to grow my business is to write a book about the powerful practices that have helped my clients grow their businesses so dramatically over the last 20 years.

 

But writing a book, at least for me, demands extended periods of focus where my mind and energy is immersed in the writing. I tried for a while to make progress in short windows of time in between other things, but I was getting nowhere. I spent most of the time getting re-immersed in subject, and just as I was hitting my stride, the other things I needed to do took me away.

Good vs. Better Choices

It wasn’t that I was getting pulled into unproductive things so much (of course there were a few of those). The problem I was facing was that the “other” things were all good, valuable and productive things, like working with my clients, developing new business, and blogging. The good things were keeping me from doing the even better thing—writing my book. I think this is what makes focus so hard for many people—even when we know what the most important thing is we get off-track doing useful, but less impactful activities. Eli Goldratt often warned of this, using a Yiddish word, choopchick, which describes the situation I described above.

In my case I finally forced myself to drop a few of my “choopchicks” and focus on the book. One of those things I had set aside to focus on the book was blogging, which explains why it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. The first draft of the book is done and in the hands of my editors, so I thought I’d use this little window of time to write about my experience with focus. What I learned from the experience is pretty amazing. As soon as I set aside the majority of my choopchicks I became radically more productive.

I actually completed the book that had been going nowhere in just a few weeks with my attention concentrated. I was expecting that it would take much longer—which by the way had made it harder for me to commit to focusing on it earlier for fear that it would mean setting aside the other things for a long period of time. This mindset came from my experience that it takes a long time to do something like write a book—which of course it does when you are always multi-tasking and devoting short windows of time to it. But when I concentrated my efforts, and forced myself to ignore the choopchicks, my productivity soared.

I think we have all experienced this in some form or other. I frequently hear people say that when they come in early to work, when they are less likely to be interrupted, they are able to get more work done in an hour or two than in a whole day of shifting their efforts between many things. For me it took both physical discipline—to ignore my email during my writing periods, to let the calls go into voicemail—and even more so, mental discipline to keep my mind from telling me that I needed to be putting out a blog or thinking about how to help a client overcome an important obstacle they were facing.

What got me through it was to focus not on what “to do”, but on what “not to do”. I wrote a little Not to Do list with a couple of reasons why each activity was not as important as writing the book, and why it could wait for a while. For things that I feared would suffer from lack of attention I dug a little deeper and challenged some of the assumptions I had in my head about why they couldn’t wait. I found that for most of them those assumptions weren’t really valid, setting them aside wouldn’t really hurt things at all.

For the remaining few items on my list I mapped out and took some steps to commit to doing very specific actions, at a specific time to address the truly urgent aspects of that activity. This enabled me to carve out the blocks of time I needed to focus on the book. When the appointed time I set the book aside for a day and focused on getting those things done, not worrying about or even trying to sneak in writing time. I was able to complete these things a good bit faster than I had expected and found myself back to my writing a day earlier than planned. The little break also seemed to re-new my energy and make me more productive in my writing.

So if focus is a challenge for you, try shifting your approach to the question of what NOT to do. You already know on what you should be spending the majority of your time, figure out what you have to stop doing and how to stop doing it as soon as you can.

I’m going to have to stop blogging again for a couple more weeks to finish the book, I hope you understand why. I’m looking forward to my next post though when I can tell you the book is done and available. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your experiences with focus, and how you manage to achieve it. So please share them in the comments. I’m convinced focus is the key to the level of productivity we need to achieve our goals, personally and professionally. Good luck!