“We have met the enemy, and they are us.” -Walt Kelly comic strip artist, slightly adapting Master Commandant Oliver Perry’s original saying.
Creating is a daily battle
I’ve long known what it takes for me to succeed: it’s focus.
I constantly remind myself of my top priority and strive to eliminate the distractions and noise that keep me from focusing on that priority.
But, creating and maintaining focus is a battle.
I often fail until I remind myself yet again of what’s important and then take action to cut out the noise and distractions.
As an executive, I faced this challenge daily and adopted some radical (by most standards) practices to combat the drift away from focusing on what’s important. As a solopreneur striving to create programs, write books, and develop new products, maintaining focus is even more difficult for me than in my executive days.
Most of us share the challenge of creating focus, particularly in our over-scheduled workdays and overly full personal lives.
We chase the urgent and, too often, the urgent-unimportant, exhaust ourselves, and then operate in an energy-depleted state until we can recharge. Much like trying to drive across the country in your electric car right now, there are way too few opportunities to recharge.
And then we do it again, with our calendars automatically filling and our devices drawing us away until we run out of time for the real priorities.
You cannot be at your best if you don’t create focus
It’s the failure to create time to think deeply and to explore and experiment that is ultimately sacrificed on the altar of the urgent and the urgent-unimportant.
Yet, concentrating on what’s important—thinking deeply—and then exploring and experimenting is the only path to learning, growth, and success.
The cadence is simple: think, explore, experiment, observe, reflect, refine.
Whether you are a CEO, a frontline manager, or a contributor, this cadence of activities is essential for growth and learning. And to bring it to life, you have to create focus.
Ideas to help you create focus in your life
-Ask yourself these questions:
In re-reading Aaron Dignan’s excellent and very relevant book from 2019, Brave New Work, I was struck again by the powerful question in the opening paragraph of Chapter 1: “What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life?”
Take your list of New Year’s resolutions, wad it up, throw it out, and replace it with Dignan’s question. Seriously, “What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life?”
My add-on(s) include: “What initiatives must you focus on to pursue the best work of your life?” Effectively, I’m asking you to answer: “What are your true priorities?”
The output of this exercise should point to your true priorities and what you need to do to eliminate the blockers.
I suspect your honest answers to Dignan’s question will all tie back to time. (Mine did.) Finding time. Making time. Doing less of something and more of what’s important. It’s all about focus.
Answering the second set of questions, “What should you be doing?/What are your true priorities?” demands soul-searching. Unambiguously, my answer is: read more to stimulate creativity and strengthen my writing, teaching, and coaching. To do this, I have to follow the advice below.
-Say “No” every day, but do it with finesse.
In my experience, good people say “yes” too often and to their detriment. Start carefully filtering the requests you encounter and make honest assessments.
In the workplace, one way to say “no” gently is to broker relationships where individuals with common interests can help each other.
A client recently indicated they were asked to mentor a young professional. This was a bad time for the individual to dilute their efforts as much as they wanted to help the aspiring mentee. Instead, she directed the individual to another senior manager who had recently indicated a desire to do more mentoring and coaching. Brokering relationships and introductions is a power tactic for growing your influence and helps you maintain focus.
Another client faced a seemingly endless stream of shifting priorities from their boss. The client (the employee) created a list, identified his top two priorities, and reviewed it with the boss. The boss agreed. The employee then indicated which requests he was going to delegate out and which he was going to ignore until a later date. While this discussion took courage, it opened a new focus-oriented dialog between the boss and the employee.
Saying “No” in our personal lives is tougher. Mine involves what I term “Deleting Distractions.” Read on.
-How to delete distractions in your life
Left to my designs, I’m a one-person distraction-generating machine. I have a lot of interests and more than a few hobbies, and our residing at the lake leaves me with a seasonal list of chores that I both love to do and can become all-consuming. Here are some techniques for killing the distractions and finding time to focus on your true priorities:
Get better sleep to improve overall performance.
Finding quality sleep is a constant battle for me. I work at it through exercise and by sticking to a routine that increases my odds of sleeping well.
Use the very early mornings more productively.
Armed with good sleep, the early mornings are found time. I can choose activities my brain likes—e.g., checking in on social media or running through my latest Flipboard pages. Or, I can get to work. I allow ten minutes of gratuitous fun and then get to work.
Reframe chores or hobby time as rewards.
I identify the most critical chore(s) or desired hobby activity and leave those for later in the day as a reward. Yeah, it’s a bit of mental self-trickery, but I look forward to the shift from screen to chores or hobbies. I walk away from the screen with a sense of accomplishment, and when I knock out the chores or engage in a hobby, I reinforce the sense of accomplishment.
One note: workouts are not rewards. They are essential—like breathing— and are inviolable in my daily life. I’ve developed a variety of strength and cardio workouts that can expand or contract to fit within the schedule.
Journal activities to capture insights and gauge progress
I’ve gone entirely analog with my journal and use it primarily to document priorities, log time, capture insights, and note new ideas. It’s messy and cluttered, and my handwriting would make the nuns in grammar school turn red with rage, but the journaling keeps me accountable to myself. Priorities are front-and-center; even if I drift for a day, the journaling work helps me recenter and re-focus.
The Bottom Line for Now:
Quality time immersed in important work is the only path to success short of winning the lottery, and this latter activity is luck, not success. To find this quality time for you to do your best work, you have to create focus. Creating focus is a complex, never-ending battle that you wage against yourself. It takes deliberate effort centered on behaviors that work for you. I hope some of the above support your efforts. Share what works for you, so we all benefit.
Wishing you a focus-filled year leading to learning, growth, and success.
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