The Art of Focus: an overarching theme and tying a few things together

I've noticed a recurring overarching theme for me recently. Maybe it's a matter of my own journey to becoming more of an essentialist (as in the good book by Greg McKeown), that I am being much more deliberate about doing less things, but get them further.

The thing is that we humans have an incredible capacity to fill up our time. But the goal is not to be busy (for the sake of it). The goal is to do the right thing, now, and then again. Figuring out what is the right thing to do now is more an art than a hard science - and that's where the challenge is:

If you can only do one thing, what would that be, now?

What makes this a simple yet often hard question to answer is because it is very important and empowering, as it speaks about focus, but in which direction?

For my own sake, and as part of an internalization exercise of feedback when I talked about focus with my team recently, I've learned a new framing that I believe can further help articulate what being focus truly means, on a more practical level. You have to excuse me for my complete lack of talent for sketching stuff, although what matters is the understanding of what I am trying to communicate (so yes, I've picked my battle here and focused on the essence…).

And what I mean to communicate here is that focusing should take those three horizons into perspective, to be more effective:

What does long-term success look like? What is the purpose, where are headed?

Then be able to narrow it down, and define tangible short to medium-term outcomes we can use to assess progress.

And then finally, and perhaps more importantly, what's the thing I can focus on now that will move things in the right direction?

I fully appreciate and am aware this is all much easier said than done. But you get to start somewhere, and I will always suggest where you are, anchored in reality. Start small, learn from there, and keep grinding…

It is also important to realize this is an ongoing and perhaps never ending process, where you are constantly anchoring your focus on a long hall purpose, which guides the definition of more tangible goals for the next reasonable time frame, and that you finally execute by sharp focus on what you can do, now!

Now, I did mention in the beginning, and for that matter in the title, that this is about trying a few things together as well, and talking about a recurring pattern in what I've been writing here. So here are some additional insights on connected matters:

• In "What's wrong with the world", I wrote about the liberating concept of 'what can I do about it?" To take always the perspective that what's most relevant to what's wrong, to me, is the things I can control, and focus on those.

• In "Start at the end:...", I added the layer of guidance of also asking "what is right", and starting from asking ourselves what we want to achieve and working backwards from that. That is exactly what the additional longer-term perspectives of focus are all about.

• Then, in "A big contradiction of current days…", I took a bit of a tangent road, still related somewhat, to talk about framing the focus on making things better on the system of work, rather than directly on people and their "mindsets" (pun intended).

• Finally, in "A plot twist on a sad tale…", which in itself was a consolidation of an informal trilogy along with two other posts, I talk about priority and (focus on) value.

Ultimately, the whole premise of taking the different horizons of focus also alludes to keeping our options open:

Do less things, but (get) better (at them) now! While still being curious to explore options and take a broad interest perspective.