Focus! It’s not just for cameras. Life takes smarts to do it right. And not just smarts, but enough attention to actually learn something new. Or allow your creativity to create wonderful new realities for you. Or take sustained action. Or just put more than two thoughts together.
You can focus on many levels. If you’re creating a Black Curse to send all the inhabitants of the Enchanted Kingdom to a fishing village in Maine, you might need to sustain your focus for weeks or months. For that, you need project management, or Get-it-Done Groups. That will be a separate exercise.
Today, we’re talking about short-term focus. The kind of focus you need if you just want to write a coherent blog post. Or take your weekly deep dive into a fascinating new aspect of the mating habits of naked, blind mole-rats. Or come up with a strategy for convincing Eliza Dushku to make a guest appearance on your podcast.
Focus Is Hard. Really Hard.
Focus is a skill. And in a world that’s trying to distract you at every turn, you need to treat it like a skill. Practice. Really practice. So let’s break it down. We’ll master the “micro-skills” that go into focus.
If you’re going to focus, you’re gonna focus. Take a moment and list all the ways the outside world can stomp on your psyche. Let me help:
Micro-skill 1: Eliminate External Interruptions
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
