Life Experiment 33, 2021

Hey There.

I want to talk about Focus. Again? Yes again!

About a month ago here , I announced how I'll start writing the book called Fundamental Quantities of Life (FQL). Last month, I worked on the book precisely for two hours ... OK, maybe three.

The point is I was thinking all the time about the book. It always felt like I was actively working on the book. Little I realised (until I checked the time tracking table) how I haven't really done any work on the book.

So I figured, you know, let's put my actions where my mouth was and actually do the work. I allocated some time to the cause.

One of the Fundamental Quantities of Life that I have identified besides time, work, etc. was Focus.

As with the few of the past essays:

• Focus Jumps and their effects
• Emotional frustration involved with starting from scratch
• Long Run Context Switching

And with some more digging on the topic, I realised that Focus can easily be a book on its own. Should it be? Yes, if done right. Even though there are such wonderful books out there like:

• Deep Work by Cal Newport
• Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey

Why? Those books mainly talk about achieving short term focus. But not long term one, it's benefits and side effects.

So what do I mean by Short and Long term focus?

• Short Term Focus: Ability to focus on any given day to do a task for a few hours. Writing an article, coding something up, doing a bit of math, or reading.
• Long Term Focus: Ability to focus on one project for years. A PhD, for example, or a law career, or a Personal Brand website like Life Experiment .

There's one place where the ability of long term focus really stands out: management. As a leader, your job is to keep pushing the project forward, remove the obstacles and push forward again. That requires the ability to keep a long term goal in sight no matter what. Which is well long term focus 🙂

Day after day. I used to do this when leading big projects in scouting, push and push and push some more. It wasn't until recently that my long time friend Rok (now the chief commissioner of the Slovenian scouting organisation) reminded me of this push forward mentality.

So I thought to myself. If this push, push, push works for large projects, why not apply it to private life?

One type of Focus isn't more important than the other. We need the right balance of Long and Short Term focus. The interplay between them is what matters.

So the aim for the FQL book: Focus will be to explore how Long & Short Term focus can be leveraged. What tools we can set up in our life to achieve Long & Short Term Focus over and over again.

One such focus tool I recently started developing for myself is:

Focus Board

This is a little different from the Kanban board I made a while ago (more here ).

Idea behind Focus Board is that we have max. 4 projects on it:

For each project, we can only define:

• What's the end goal?
• What's the next step to take towards the goal?

Then there are timestamps:

• Week when the project was started (2019-47 for Personal brand, for example).
• Current week (2021-33).
• Week that the next step was added to the board (2021-33).

Focus Board is basically Kanban board merged with Hill charts:

Hill charts were developed by Basecamp to track what projects have been stuck for too long. More on them can be found in their free ReShape book here .

How is Focus Board any different from the Kanban board?

The idea behind Kanban boards is that we have all the tasks listed and then we move them from the backlog -> to doing -> to done. One task at a time per team member.

Kanban board "requires/encourages" us to define all the tasks we might not know yet. In contrast, Focus board forces us to specify only the next task and nothing more.

And that's the main benefit. By focusing on defining and executing only the next step, you ensure that you don't overthink but actually execute that next step.

So this is on a weekly level. What about on a daily level?

Well, just create a to-do list in the morning that allows you to tackle some of those next steps you defined on the Focus Board. Whatever you complete that day is fine. If any to-dos are left, delete them if they don't align with any of the next steps for the project.

That's it.

That's really all there is to productivity. Few consistent daily moves in the same direction over and over again.

I actually really like this process so much that I might make an app for it 🙂 Oh no, Focus 😛 Book first, then the App for the promotion of the book.

Oh, and word of caution. Focus Boards are probably best suited for individuals, not that much for very, very large teams. At least not in this proposed shape.

Cheers

Ziga