Peter Lübeck

A week ago I decided to try out a new way of achieving focus by putting my trust to chance. By randomly selecting an area of focus from a number of different areas of my choosing, my aim was to commit myself to focus all of my spare time/attention to that particular area.

This week my area of focus has been Professional Development, and I must say that the results have been quite positive! I have not been nearly as distracted by my other projects as I usually am, and I have felt a strong urge to follow through on my commitment. I have still allowed myself to do things not connected to professional development, like trying to beat Baldur’s Gate 2 for instance, so my commitment luckily hasn’t been bordering on fanaticism.

So what have I been doing exactly?

Well, being fairly new to the games business I usually feel a strong need to seek knowledge that will help me improve my prowess as a games producer. This includes re-evaluating my behavior as a leader, organizer, designer and manager, as well as looking at how other people does things. I recently have been reading up on servant leadership, creativity and project methodologies of different shapes and sizes, and have started to incorporate this into my daily work.

In my current position as producer/consultant at Tarsier Studios I spend a lot of time looking at ways to improve the production process. In the spirit of my “assigned” focus of the week I have put a large part of my spare time towards researching different agile development methodologies and looking at how I can adapt and modify these to fit my way of being, working and managing.

Since I always listen to things through my iPhone when I am walking to work and the like, I thought it a good idea that what I listened to reflected my focus. I found the Agile Toolkit to be a great source of information on Agile software development, so I loaded up my iPhone with enough episodes to last me a week. I then looked through my Things database to see what other agile related things I have picked up and stored for future reference.

I found, and spent an hour watching, Scrum Tuning: Lessons Learned at Google, where the father of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, did a walkthrough of the results of the Scrum implementation at the Google AdWords department. It is definitely a good watch for people interested in hearing more about Scrum, and from the mouth of the Creator no less. This served as a springboard for my research for the rest of the week, and also motivated me into realizing a planned project of mine.

For quite a while I have been taking notes of everything I see, read and experience with regards to leadership and management, especially lessons learned from project evaluations and post mortems. What I haven’t been doing is to make something interesting and concrete out of these notes. So in the spirit of this weeks focus I started working on a manifest of sorts where I am putting together all my thoughts, ideas and best practices on these areas into a cohesive document that will serve as the foundation for my continued implementation and study of agile work processes and leadership practices. It is only a rough draft, but I must say that I never expected to get as much done as I did this week, all thanks to achieving and committing to focus.

My only caveat with this method of achieving focus is that a week might be too short a time span for achieving something noteworthy. At the same time I think it is a good way to keep things fresh and interesting, and the limited time frame is an additional spur to achieving and keeping focus. If you were to do a two week run you might loose your focus before the time is up. I will probably continue with Focus of the Week for some time to come, but I am unsure of whether or not to continue choosing an area at random or instead make a concious decision. I guess it is time to make a decision since I need to determine my focus for the upcoming week.

After reviewing the areas in my IO Interactive Cap of Randomness, I have decided to continue to allow chance to do the selection for me. Here goes…

Still getting nervous over this!

The note says:

Experiences, which means I will spend this week looking at ways to improve how I experience things in my life, and at what things to experience. This includes planning trips and visits to friends and family, seeing what cultural events and music performances I might want to go to in the upcoming months as well as looking at what movies to see, what games to play and what books to read.

This might sound like a lame focus for a whole week since I perhaps should do these things anyway, but knowing how I work I need to dedicate myself to something in order to perform at my best! The Power of Focus! You should try it sometime.

I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about focus lately; how you need to find focus in order to accomplish great things, or even anything at all. Focus is a great tool since it allows you to put all your energy toward a single task or project. There are a lot of difficulties surrounding focus though, e.g. all the constant distractions in your life, your (my) ambition to do everything at once and, as I have come to realize, actually deciding on what you want/need/can/should focus on.

I have a lot of different projects that I have some ambition of working on, probably too many, and I don’t feel like I am getting as much done as I could. So, after battling the focus issue for a while I’ve come up with the following idea:

Let chance decide what your area of focus for the upcoming week will be, and then don’t do anything but that for the whole week.

What I have done is to write down, on small pieces of paper, every possible area that I might want to focus on (twelve in total). I then fold the pieces and put them in a hat, which in this case is my IO Interactive cap that has been lying around in my closet for some years since my head is too big for it. I then shuffle the notes and simply pick one and see what I get.

The area that I end up picking will be the focus of my attention for an entire week, or until I cannot do anything more with it, in which case I will pick a new area. This weekly focus is of course something that affects my spare time, and not my work, even though you could apply it to your work as well.

Even though I haven’t given it a go yet, there’s one thing that I’ve prepared for, namely lack of motivation to work on a particular area. All of the areas of focus that I’ve put in the hat are things that I actually want to do. If you try to fool yourself by putting down a project that you rather avoided doing and end up getting that as your weekly focus you will most likely fail in doing something about it. So before putting the areas in the hat I looked at each of them and imagined how I would feel if I got that particular area. If I didn’t get a positive image in my head about a particular area, I didn’t put it in the hat (two areas got left out because they didn’t feel relevant at this point in time).

So now it’s time to put this to the test! Here goes…

Whoo, this is actually pretty scary for some reason. I guess it could be a sign that I am comitting to my experiment, which is great! The whole point of this is to make myself commit to being focused!

I have picked a piece of paper, and now for the unfolding…

And the note says:

Professional Development, which in my case means I will spend the coming week focusing on leadership, project management, methodologies etc.

Let’s see how it goes!