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.

IO Cap

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!