Tag / focus

by Dave

Vacation Work

Apparently, I’m not good at taking enough time off throughout the year because it took me until last week to realize that I have ten days of vacation time banked that I have to use before this month is over or I lose it. But now that I’m being forced to use it, I intend to make the most of it.

For starters, I’m taking a full week off from work at the office to stay at home and do work instead. That is, I’m leaving behind my office email and calendar and meetings so I can retreat to bigger, deeper projects; pulling myself away from the demands of others to focus on the demands of my soul.

And I really do mean that. This is time off to feed my soul, my larger self, what makes me me. It is time indulge my creative hunger, dive deeper into the ideas I want to research and explore, and fill in the gaps of home projects that I’ve neglected for too long.

I will probably use some of this time to work on stuff related to my job as well, and that’s okay. We often think of that as a bad thing – we tell each other not to do “work stuff” while we’re away. But I’ve been in my job long enough now that so much of my “work stuff” is also “me stuff” that I care about. There things I want to learn and practice for myself during vactation time because I know they will make me better at my job when I return to the office. Why would we ever discourage that?

We understand the benefits of semi-annual offsite retreats for a leadership team or organization to focus on in-depth discussion and exploration of big ideas, long-term plans, and get to know their colleagues better. So why not use personal time away for the same purpose? Paid vacation time away from the office alone is a perfect opportunity to catch up on reading and research that has piled up; to explore my own creative ideas, make long-term plans, build skills, and find clarity.

I realize it is a priviliged situation to be in at all, to even have a job that offers paid time-off in the first place—I’ve had jobs in the past where this wasn’t the case. And to be able to have enough that I can spend this on my own, and still have real vacation time available later to spend with my wife traveling and not thinking about anything but the experience of being away.

It’s not like I don’t get alone time already. I’m usually up early enough to get an hour or two for daily reading and writing. And that morning focus is good, but it’s limited. It only allows for short writing sprints, iterating and editing blog posts like this, thinking out an idea as I go and redrafting, rewriting for a weekly goal.

A full week off for myself allows for something bigger, a chance to cast my net into much deeper waters and pull ideas and connections to the surface that for now I only sense are there, waiting to be found. But I am not setting any expectations, either. I have no specific goal of what I expect to find. The discovery process itself is the only goal I need.

At the end of this week I may not have much to physically show for it—no thick reports or manifestos, no charts or presentations—but I will have a more detailed map of the terrain than I had before. I will have a better sense of where I’m going, what the obstacles are, the challenges, and the opportunities, and I’ll be able to take my first steps on a path through it all.

I’m leaving the office for a week to work for myself from a fresh perspective. When I return to the office, I plan to bring some of that fresh perspective with me, wrapped in shiny foil swans like choice morsels from an indulgent feast of ideas.

by Dave

Focus is Trending

I thought I was done thinking and writing about the importance of focus after my last post, but over the past week I kept seeing echoes of the topic in new things I was reading that were in most ways unrelated. A blog post here, a magazine article there, all had something to say about focus and productivity that jumped out to me.

Being aware of our how well we focus our attention on a task at hand, and stay focused without distraction or interruption, is the most important skill to learn if we want to be more productive with our time. But no matter how skilled we become, we’ll never be able to actually create more time.
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by Dave

Finding Focus

It’s only been a week since my last post about paying attention and my attention has already drifted. But in a good way. That is to say, as my #ConstructiveSummer reading of Work Simply has continued, I’ve moved from being more focused on my attention, to paying more attention to my focus.

I was focused on my attention; now I’m paying more attention to my focus.

There’s a lot of subtle detail in that shift. Attention and focus seem to go hand in hand, two sides of the same coin, but the more I read and observe about myself at work and through my daily routines, the more I realize the difference in scope that attention has compared to focus. Mainly that I can “pay attention” to a lot of different things and still be distracted and unproductive, but when I am really focused on a task I don’t distract easily and will find it hard to do anything else until what I’m working on is done.

I’ve known for years now that my biggest daily challenge is with keeping focused on a task. Call it “monkey mind” or just A.D.D., staying focused on a task that isn’t naturally engaging often takes extraordinary effort for me, and it’s something I’ve struggled with since elementary school. My parents could tell you stories…

Over the years I have invented all kinds of tactics for coping with this, and for the most part I improved. But recently, moving into a new career brought out my weaknesses in ways I haven’t had to deal with in a long time. I started falling behind, losing track of deadlines, and failing to complete important tasks. Frankly, it was embarrassing, and depressing.

But I have found some improvement from medication over the past few years, despite my initial resistance. Taking a pill has such a strong stigma for me, something associated with being sick or broken, as if it was a crutch; something for short-term assistance until it can be overcome by willpower and discipline. But in the past couple of years I’ve worked with my doctor and found a formula and dosage that is consistently beneficial and sustainable. It’s not a crutch anymore, but more like eyeglasses for my brain: I can see and operate in the world without them, but everything is much more clear with them on, and my natural forces of resistance are drastically diminished. In a word, I feel more normal.

Of course, there is no magic pill to solve the larger problem of getting things done. I’m glad to have found that extra tool that helps, but there’s no point in having focus if it’s not being put to good use. Focus is how we burn the fuel of attention, and we pay for all that attention with time.

Focus is how we burn the fuel of attention, and we pay  for that attention with time.

Time is a finite commodity we are spending every minute of every day. How we choose to spend that resource, especially as it applies to our natural desire to be productive, requires attention and focus. And, more importantly, it requires understanding our goals in all aspects of our life. Without understanding what is really important to us, even if that evolves and changes, we are just losing time.

Those goals are what I plan to focus on next.