When we talk about focus, we often talk about strategies and tactics to minimize distraction, clarify priorities and “do the work.” We say to ourselves that if we could just get it together and stay focused on what matters, everything would improve.
And so we go in search of ways to find our focus, including:
✅ Saying no instead of yes
✅ Developing a morning routine
✅ Setting up a weekly meeting to plan and prep for the week ahead
✅ Time blocking and task batching
✅ Committing to “eat the frog” before noon each day
✅ Leveraging tools like Notion or Asana or Trello or analogue bullet journals to stay organized
And if we’re lucky, these strategies work – sometimes really well – for a good, long while. Until one day they don’t, and then we panic and go in search of another strategy or tool to bring us back to the priorities at hand.
What’s often overlooked is that focus isn’t really just about priorities or habits or time blocking…
Focus is really about courage.
When we focus on specific things, to the exclusion of others, we are engaging in an act of courage. We are saying, “This thing (project/goal/initiative etc) matters most right now, and so I’m going to have to let go of all the other things that could take my attention, regardless how exciting, shiny or compelling they may be.”
We exercise courage when we focus because we have decided: we are no longer humming and hawing, second-guessing or over-thinking, we are resolved to the project at hand.
We’re no longer hedging our bets or keeping our options open, which keeps us stuck but also free from possible failure or rejection, we’re bravely moving forward into the unknown.
Staying focused requires a level of commitment that can bring up all sorts of fears and inner dialogue that can send us running for a quick Instagram hit or a good old-fashioned closet clean out (or is it just me who cleans when I should be focusing?).
Some of these worries look like:
📍We worry our work isn’t good enough, smart enough, concise enough, profound enough…
📍We worry our ideas are one-offs and we won’t be able to continue generating them…
📍We worry we won’t be able to sustain this level of focus for the time required to complete it…
📍We worry about putting our work out into the world for feedback and possible criticism…
📍We worry that once the work is complete, it won’t be the success we were hoping for…
And so, we deflect, delay or defer taking action. Or we find ourselves so knee deep in busywork, putting out fires, that there is literally no time left to give the thing we say we care about.
We jump from thing to thing, yes to yes, project to project – just enough to say we haven’t forgotten about it all together, but more than enough to only stay in the shallow end of the pool.
Focus requires our courage.
The paper planners, project plans, Pomodoro timers and priority mapping helps, to be sure. I use an assortment of tools and strategies to help me stay focused and present for the projects I care about. And this is why I host a Leader Retreat every quarter inside LEAD.Well – knowing where to put our focus and how we’ll execute on it matters because with no road map, we’re moving without a clear direction.
But courage is what really gets us over the finish line.
Our courage to stay true to our values, to be consistent, to be vulnerable, to be decisive, to make mistakes, to be dedicated and to hold our boundaries even as the world is testing every last one of them, is what it takes to stay focused on what matters most.
What needs YOUR courage?
Steph (she/her) x
p.s. If you’d like to join us for our upcoming Leader Retreat next Friday (March 26th, 2021), and enjoy a year’s membership inside LEAD.Well including our April Leadership Lab: Communicate with Confidence, click here to learn more and join us.
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While courage may be at the heart of staying focused, having a distraction-free block of time in front of us helps a lot too. My friend Dawn O’Connor runs Focus Bubbles – facilitated work sessions to help you get stuff done. As a big believer in the “power hour” concept of using a short burst of time to close all those open loops and make meaningful progress, I’m going to give one of Dawn’s Focus Bubbles a try. Check it out here.
We’re talking about The Price of Perfection over in LEAD.Well this month, and let’s just say, there’s a clear correlation between the courage to focus and the price of perfection. When we’re holding ourselves to standards we’ll never meet (because what IS perfect anyway), it’s easy to slip out of focus and into distraction. Instead of taking the risk of shipping less than perfect work, we busy ourselves with urgent or unimportant work instead. Perhaps we should embrace keeping it stupid.
Sometimes we need to take a break from focusing — on anything. I’m not particularly skilled in the world of “doing nothing” – even if I’m not actively working on something, I can usually be found with a podcast playing in my ears or an idea twirling around in circles in my head. But sometimes the best thing to do is absolutely nothing. You Are Doing Something Important When You Aren’t Doing Anything.
Why you’re more creative in coffee shops. You won’t get any argument from me. Working from a coffee shop is one of the things I miss most. Here’s a virtual alternative. This helps a little too.
This made me laugh, and I only wish I had thought of it last term when we were in online learning overwhelm. How to be a genius.
Did you watch the Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah? I’m guilty as charged. While so much of what they said about “the firm” was disappointing at best and dangerous at worst, I can’t say I was surprised by it – given, well you know, history. 🙄 There have been a lot of hot takes ever since, but I appreciated this one.
There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.
~Jane Austen
💥THE WEEK IN A GIF
May your week ahead be squirrel (distraction) free.
