Much like my topic a few weeks ago emphasizing the importance of finding time to think deeply about the big issues in front of us, it takes deliberate and sometimes herculean effort to find focus in our work lives.
Focus is a key ingredient on the critical path to success.
Focus is frightening. It is a deliberate decision to tune-out everything else and give ourselves to something that we don’t know or don’t understand. Also, if we focus, we might fail.
Few of us are truly comfortable pro-actively inviting the specter of failure to our work activities, and so we strive to do everything but focus.
We use our devices as mind-candy, we fill our calendars with transactional meetings and activities and we do everything possible but focus on the one or two issues that will make a difference.
Days turn into weeks and quarters and while we know we should be making progress on those big initiatives, they’re daunting and frightening and we don’t know where to start. And we choose not to focus on moving beyond those self-generated bogeymen.
Management teams do this all of the time with strategy. It’s damned hard to create and execute and refine strategy, so instead of focusing on narrowing down the options and making decisions on what not to do, they live in a world that is issue to issue. Often, the outcome is a collection of activities and costs and revenue plans and budgets that have no meaningful relationship to each other. The lack of focus ensures the absence of strategy.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Focus is a very personal issue. It comes from recognition of the importance of tuning out all of the extraneous noise around us and stepping off the cliff into the unknown of new and daunting initiatives. It’s as much a battle within our own minds as it is within the external environment. Achieving focus is a battle you have to win if you expect to make meaning and move forward during your time here.
Is it time to focus?
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