How To Suck Less at FOCUS

Focus is hard.  I was once in a meeting where the speaker observed that we need to focus on THIS and THAT and this other thing and that over there as well.  We had a final list of 5 or 6 things we should be sure to “focus” on in the coming year.

 

I couldn’t help but think of the line from “The Princess Bride” – “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

 

Yes, we all have many things that are important and need to get done – as businesses, as people and as dads.  We trick ourselves into thinking that because they are all important now, they should all be done now. 

 

PLUS the world keeps manufacturing new types of buzzes and dings and devices to pull our sacred attention toward someone else’s shiny priority.  Every one of these saps another 10% of our attention as we almost finish replying to the last one before the phone rings…

 

What’s worse, we wear that “ability” as a badge of honor.  “You think YOU can multi-task?  Get a load of what I’M handling.”

 

I’ve done that.  And I convinced myself it’s worth both aspiring to and bragging about.

 

But here’s the catch:

 

Focus is a metaphor we’ve adapted from photography.  A camera can focus on one thing at a time.  If we try to focus it on two things, one (or BOTH) are blurry.  We’ll get a picture that is probably fine-ish, and we can tell what it is, but it won’t be as clear as two pictures each focused on one thing. 

 

Life is not that different. 

 

We understand that clearly in many scenarios when it’s not us.

 

Should busy surgeons have 3 or 4 surgeries teed up in the same room as they bounce back and forth? 

 

…and it’s cheating to say your reason for thinking that’s dumb is prevention of infection or contamination.

 

How do I know?  Let’s pretend there was no such thing as bacteria or infections and your child needs heart surgery.  Are you sending him in to Dr. 3-at-a-time or Dr. Focus-only-on-your-kid? 

 

Why are our commitments any different than the surgeon’s? Just because many things CAN be done at the same time doesn’t mean they SHOULD, especially if we want the best results for our most important things.

 

Even our computer gets this – run too many applications at the same time and you can manage for a while.  But keep it up and you can’t outrun the “Blue Screen of Death.” (apologies Mac users! …ask a PC friend what that means.)  Don’t live a life that requires you to Ctrl-Alt-Del yourSELF every few weeks to break the logjam. 

 

Do one thing at a time and do it well.  Then move on to the next.  In the end you’ll have both better results and a quieter mind.

 

“Gee, thanks tough guy. But I can’t just do that all tomorrow!”

 

Me neither.  But the goal is progress, not perfection.  Installing effective focus into our crazy lives can feel difficult.  But focus is a skill, so start small. 

 

Practice Uni-tasking Pick one thing today that is your most important thing, then set aside an hour or so to focus exclusively on that, which means protect yourself from all the shiny dings and buzzes. Shut your phone off if you need.  Close your browsers.  Log out of social media.  If you don’t know what distracts you most, you will after the first 10 minutes. Then protect yourself from that. When the hour is up, go back to the rest of your zany day. 

 

Do that for one thing a day every day this week.

 

Next week ask yourself how well you did those things.  How did you feel when you were done with your hour each day?  Maybe a mix of relieved, a little guilty, and proud?  Were a couple of those hours dedicated to your family?  Was that worth it to them? 

 

The hardest part will be saying “No!” to the rest of the world for 60 minutes.  But the rest of the world can wait one hour for almost anything.  Did those commitments really suffer by waiting an hour for your attention?  And the things you focused on are both higher quality than they would have been and less taxing on your mental RAM. 

 

Let me know how it works out.