Word of the Week: Focus

This week was fantastic as usual with our pilot team. We get so much inspiration and positive energy from each other.

But the word of the week for us is FOCUS. Actually it's come up a few times today and it's an awesome word.  

The team is at that point where we are taking action on our goals.  We really started last week. We looked at our goals and broke them down into goals for the month and then we broke it down some more into goals for the week.

We share our tasks with each other and we commit to doing the work.  Then we get back together and discuss our progress, where we got stuck and what we learned.  And then we start again.

The theme that came out this week was FOCUS.  Since it was our first week, we didn't finish as much as we wanted but we did actually do pretty well considering our loose planning.  But Ms K. talked about how having a list helps her focus and Ms. M. talked about how she's...

"looking at what NOT to focus on in order to get the important work done"

Now that is awesomeness!

As Steve Job's quote above says - deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. So often we say we want to focus but we don't remove the noise.  We end up with all the stuff while we struggle with trying to get done what we think is important. But the noise is still there and we end up not doing a great job of focusing on what's important.

It's something I study in my many interests that talk about minimalism, which is based on essentialism.  Greg McKeown, author of one of my new favorite books - Essentialism, says that essentialists carefully select the things they say YES to and say NO to everything else.

At work today I heard the same theme.  Our company lost it's focus and now we are doing poorly.  We lost sight of what made us great by focusing on too many things.

And so it goes with so many things.  We focus on all the things that are supposed to fulfill us and then realize that we don't have time to enjoy anything. We proudly say we are good at multitasking without realizing that it's an illusion of being hyper productive and that our minds simply don't work that way.  And we waste more and more time on the things that don't matter. 

The key is really that we have to make space for what's important by removing the other things. I have s-l-o-w-l-y worked on this.  Making a conscious decision to remove the non-important things allows me to live my life with intent.  I'm a work in progress but I feel closer to my goals than ever, at least I feel like I am actually making progress.

And once you start, focusing on doing something well feels so good. It's so satisfying knowing that you are spending your time on the important things.  What will you remove from your days so that you can focus on what's important?

Read my previous post on the pilot program: The Energy of Shared Consciousness