You won’t ever make all the edges of your life smooth and finished.
Even as we grow and mature in our life, the edges also get pushed out and they remain fuzzy. Don’t worry about “fixing” those outer edges — they will always be there. Instead focus on the center and on the core — the things that truly matter — and focus on making those stronger and better.
1. Identify what you want to do.
2. Plan a time you will do it.
3. Celebrate that you followed through. (And then, repeat.)
Goals give you a direction to go.
Habits keep you moving forward toward your goals.
(This is why I track my habits and regularly revisit my goals.)
I recently revisited this article about ideas, and a few things about it stuck out fresh to me:
And, in fact, these two go together. You need to consistently finishing what you start… If you’re a slave to every new idea then you’ll never have the focus to finish a single thing.
Long-time readers here may remember back in early 2014 when I began going all-in with writing and podcasting around productivity, time management, and creativity.
Welp. Still here, still going all-in with this stuff. And over the years one thing I’ve discovered is that there are four main obstacles people face when it comes to being focused and productive. This is something I’ll be writing and sharing a lot more about in the coming months.
What’s great about these 4 obstacles is that they are very much fixable. What’s not so great is that often the symptoms of these obstacles look similar.
That’s one reason why so much productivity advice sucks (getting advice that diagnoses the wrong issue).
It’s also why folks will try a new productivity approach or app, but don’t see any progress or momentum is made. Again: they were merely treating a symptom and not the actual problem.
This is why we developed the all-new Focus Quiz.
This thing is amazing. It’s a FREE assessment that will diagnose your biggest obstacle to focus right now and help you find out how to solve it.
The assessment is free, easy, and takes just a few minutes.
You can use your personalized results to get insight into how to get a clear head amidst the overwhelming urgent issues of everyday life and make improvements to your focus, productivity, and time management.
You can take the assessment here.
Coasting in life means you are not taking action.
And, thus, you are, by nature:
A lot of productivity and time management advice includes all the things you should not do.
Why is so much productivity advice about what NOT to do?
The choices you make about your time and focus should be about what you are saying YES to.
The problem is that it is a lot harder to figure out what you want.
It’s far easier (and more dramatic) to focus on what to avoid than it is to take the time to figure out what to embrace.
In fact, the whole reason we are saying NO to some of those things is so that we can actually say YES to what we really want to do.
I am not going to check my email before lunch because I would rather spend that time writing.
Having a long list of things you don’t do will not make you productive.
What do you do in the time you’ve created for yourself? What do you choose to say YES to? Saying YES to the right thing is what makes you productive.
No is easy. Yes requires focus.
A reader recently asked me about procrastination, and I pointed them to this article about The 5-Minute Rule.
There are many activities in life that are worth doing but that aren’t always easy to get started. A few things that come to mind for me include:
When it’s time to do one of these activities, and I don’t feel like it, then I will commit to 5 minutes.
I’ll spend 5 minutes putting away the dishes; 5 minutes warming up; or 5 minutes writing whatever crappy prose comes to mind.
Then, after those first 5 minutes, if I’m still not into it I give myself permission to move on to something else. But most of the time, it only takes a few minutes for the momentum to kick in.
This was something like the 30th sabbatical week that my company has taken since 2017.
After years of these regular, week-long sabbatical breaks, I’ve discovered a few things that help me make the most of my time out of the office.
One of the best ways to get the most out of a sabbatical week is to know the difference between true rest and counterfeit rest.
True rest will leave you recharged with more energy. Thus, you want to find restful activities that give you energy rather than draining it. I love to say that if you work with your head, rest with your hands (such as cooking, woodworking, landscaping, etc.).
And so, here’s the thing: true rest usually takes a little bit of effort.
Things like reading a paperback novel, cooking a meal, going out for a walk, having a conversation with someone, listening to an audiobook with your significant other. Heck, even just sitting down, alone, and not having a phone or screen can take some effort.
And so, during my sabbatical breaks, I focus hard on getting a healthy dose of that restful and creative work.
My aim is usually to have one big project that I can get done during the week in addition to daily anchors such as exercise, getting out on a excursion, having a meal with someone, etc.
I also keep my same sleep schedule. It would be easy to toss discipline into the wind for that week and treat it like full-on vacation mode. But honestly, that leaves me feeling more exhausted and behind at the end.
Anyway, for me, this past Sabbatical that was just last week seemed to be themed around taking pictures and cooking food. I smoked about 40 lbs of beef brisket and I got out several times to make photos with my Leica Q.
One other thing, on April 12 I began posting daily videos to Instagram. You can’t schedule these videos ahead of time, I was on Instagram posting them every day, which definitely led to me spending much more time on social media than I normally would.
My Screen Time Report for last week shows an average of more than 90 minutes / day on Instagram. Ouch. Even though a lot of that was time spent in the app to create my daily videos, it’s still a lot of time on social.
Anyway, if you’re curious what an average Sabbatical week looks like for me, it’s not too far off from how I spent last week’s break. Here’s a rundown:
Smoked a 12-pound brisket, just for fun. I woke up early on Monday morning to get the brisket on the smoker. Then spent most of the day tending to the food and prepping the sides. And, because we live in Kansas City, of course I separated the point and chopped it to make burnt ends. It was fantastic.
My youngest son was home from school on Tuesday, so he and I got to work together to build new storage shelves in the guest room closet downstairs.
It was a beautiful day for a drive in the CJ-7. I took my sister out to lunch. Made some photos with the Leica Q. And, later in the evening, I lit up the backyard fire pit for dude’s night with a good friend.
Finished building the closet shelves.
Made dinner: Korean rice wraps with bulgogi beef and bulgogi tofu. Not gonna lie, the tofu was on point.
Smoked more brisket! Not one, but two (!) briskets for a fundraiser at our church that was happening Sunday. I made them the day before because they needed to be dropped off on Sunday morning and I did not want to be up and down all night tending to the brisket and hoping it would be ready in time on Sunday morning.
I personally did’t get to try the brisket (I delivered it wrapped and uncut), but I heard it turned out great. And, of course, I also made burnt ends and I did taste test those and they turned out just as incredible as the same-day ends I made on Monday.
Anna and I have made it a focus in life to go on a date every week. Sometimes we go out, and sometimes our date nights are at home because we want to stay home or maybe we just can’t find a sitter. Sometimes we sit on the back deck or walk around the neighborhood.
It has been an unusually busy month at home for us, and this past Sunday we were actually we able to get out of the house and go on a date. We went to sushi dinner, got ice cream, and enjoyed some beautiful weather walking around downtown area snapping some photos with my Leica Q.
. . . .
As you can see, my week above was a somewhat “normal” week. The only really different thing is that I didn’t go into my office to do any work.
But I still kept to my same basic daily schedule: I go to bed and wake up at the same time as I do on weeks when I am working. I kept my exercise routine and did my normal rowing and lifting workouts. Ultimately, for an average sabbatical week, the biggest change for me is that the 6-8 hours / day that I normally would be working, I instead will spend that time on personal projects — cooking, woodworking, making photos, and extra family time.
These regular sabbaticals give me the space and the time to pull back from work. I also love how the sabbatical creates a clear and consistent stopping point for our focused work cycles, that help us to avoid biting off more than we can chew and to get more work done in less time.
Being “busy” and “productive” is not the same as being strategic.
We all know the tips and tricks and best practices for how to be productive. But we don’t know how to be intentional and strategic — because strategy can be subjective and it’s not always obvious.
Here’s how to be strategic:
Don’t become so busy that you’re just doing random acts of focus and never have time to be strategic.
Perhaps, like me, you grew up being taught that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. But that doesn’t mean all questions are equal.
A great question will go much further in getting you to a great answer.
Three of my favorite smarter questions are:
Speaking of The Law of Tradeoffs, this is a fantastic little clip with my friends Josh Kaufman and Mo Bunnell talking about how to avoid indecisiveness.
There are 8 Laws of Focus and one of them is the Law of Tradeoffs.
As David Allen said, you can do anything but you cannot do everything. In order to give your perpetual devotion to any one thing it will require the perpetual neglect of many other things. Focus, therefore, requires tradeoffs.
You can only focus on so many things at a time. And you can only focus for so many hours during the day. Instead of ignoring the limitation on your energy, embrace it and find ways to routinize and automate the non-trivial areas of your life so that even when you are not giving them your full attention and devotion, they are not being fully neglected.
Speaking of meta work… if you take a few minutes to create an implementation intention for your task, then you are 3x more likely to do that task (as opposed to simply writing the task down).
What’s an implementation intention? It’s simply deciding when and where you will do something.