Manage your focus, not your time

The implication of this simple line “focus, not time” has shown up so powerfully for me in recent months that I’d like to dedicate some more attention to it. 

Two inspiring friends of mine Marc and Angel, put it this way in a recent sharing: 

“What you focus on grows. Stop managing your time. Start managing your focus.” 

This begs the questions: What are you focusing on? What do you want to be focusing on? To help with figuring that out, I like to coach of course! Or be coached when I need more clarity around my focus. In the absence of it, we can this question instead. And there’s a simple exercise around that, that has helped me tremendously. 

It goes like this. Start with a blank piece of paper and on the lefthand side, write “What am I focusing on (consciously)” and on the righthand side write “Why?”. Then, take the last 72 hours or last week and write down what tends to have taken up the most time, beginning with things that you’ve consciously chosen to do at those times. I’ll go first. Here’s an example of how I’ve done this: 

Then, take another piece of paper, that says on the lefthand side again “What am I focusing on (unconsciously)”? And again “Why?” on the righthand side. Here’s an example again from myself from doing this. You’ll notice, with the unconscious section, I like to take an in-between step first, where I’m naming the emotions that I’m generally experiencing when I’m doing these unconscious activities. Only afterward do I ask “why?” again to see what need is behind that. 

Simply doing this exercise in my experience has tremendous power. It sheds light on both my conscious and unconscious activities that I’ve placed my focus on. And it immediately returns me to a sense of power and agency that is so important when we’re taking charge of our lives. 

Afterward, if you wish to engage further, I tend to ask myself two questions:

• For the first part: Which of these activities would I like to have more of in my life? How can I do that?
• For the second part: How can go about meeting the underlying “why” of these activities in a different way? What is one next step I’d like to take towards that?

If you’d like to jump into the water and try out this exercise today or this week, I also invite you to send me an email (l.widrich@gmail.com) with a picture of the two pages alongside your experience of this. I’d enjoy hearing about how this went for you and what it brought to light. 

Happy focusing!