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The Focus Accelerator (Finally!)  →

Hooray! We just recently announced the all-new Focus Accelerator membership. It’s amazing and I think you would love being part.

In short, Focus Accelerator is your all-access pass to every single course and tool in our library, plus a community to help you get clear, take action, and keep going.

The rundown is that you get:

  • Unlimited access to every course in our library
  • Monthly coaching, workshops, and Q&A with our team
  • Accountability and breakthrough with the community

(Full details all listed here.)

This is something we’ve been working on for the past 18 months… It’s finally out there and the response has been beyond what we expected. I hope you’ll come join us.

The Focus Accelerator (Finally!)

Burnout: Modern Affliction or Human Condition  →

An excellent article by Jill Lepore for The New Yorker regarding burnout:

To be burned out is to be used up, like a battery so depleted that it can’t be recharged. In people, unlike batteries, it is said to produce the defining symptoms of ‘burnout syndrome’: exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of efficacy. Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out.

Burnout: Modern Affliction or Human Condition

Photography Storytelling Workshop book  →

I took Finn Beales’ online course version of this same training and absolutely loved it.

Probably one of the most helpful and practical guides to actually improving my photography that I’ve ever been through. And now there is also a magazine / book version of that same online course.

The fundamental ideas that I walked away with from the online course — as far as ways to shoot and things to look for — are all inside this $20 full-color workbook. If you want to take better photos, this thing is a bargain at twice the price.

Photography Storytelling Workshop book

Done and Shipped  →

I recently revisited this article about ideas, and a few things about it stuck out fresh to me:

  1. Your team and your system of execution is far more valuable than your idea.
  2. Done and shipped is vastly more important than almost done.

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.

Done and Shipped

The New Productivity Assessment  →

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 Focus Quiz steps

How it works

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.

  1. Take the Quiz (about 2-3 minutes)
  2. Get your results: find out where you are inside the Focus Flywheel and see what the biggest mistake you’re probably making right now is.
  3. Bonus: Along with your results, we’ll send you a personalized focus pathway to help you know what you should be doing now and what steps you need to take next.

You can take the assessment here.

The New Productivity Assessment

On The Point of Reading  →

“Alex & Books” on Twitter:

The point of reading is not to memorize every word… It’s to introduce yourself to new ideas, new information, and new ways of thinking.

In this exploding information economy of personal knowledge management and building your second brain, it can seem stressful (if not wasteful) if you’re not taking 100% advantage of every little sliver of information and inspiration that you come across.

But that doesn’t have to be the goal all the time. In fact, that cannot be the goal.

Sometimes it’s good enough to simply be introduced to a new idea or a new way of thinking.

That’s why I buy WAY more books that In read. And I will continue to do so.

Here are my four rules of book buying:

  • Don’t be a wimp about it.
  • Don’t stress about reading them cover to cover.
  • Make notes and mark up the margins.
  • Share what you learn.
On The Point of Reading

A Return to Analog  →

“For me, one of the signs of health in emotional margin is how much I’m writing in my notebook each week. If pages begin to stack up without any notes, ideation, or doodling, it’s a sign that I’m not slowing down enough to think on paper.”

Great article by Isaac this week on The Focus Course blog about the draw to return to analog tools.

A Return to Analog

How to be held back by schleps and egos

In this excellent article from Paul Graham, he talks about the fact that a lot of work kinda sucks — that’s the nature of it a lot of time. And so you have to just dive on in and do it.

But, unfortunately, a lot of people and teams will shy away from the work that sucks — because, well, they don’t want to do it. Who does? But it’s often the unpleasant work that leads to big breakthroughs and successes.

And so, a Paul says, that’s not to say you should go out of your way to seek out unpleasant work, but neither should you shrink from it when it’s on the path to something great.

This reminds me also of something from Scott Belskey:

There is an inverse correlation between how much you value your time and how much “luck” you encounter (i.e. noticing opportunities around you and capitalizing on them).

New successes require lowering your expected ROI on your time.</blockquote >This is how inflated egos extinguish new possibility: the more important you think you are, then the less open you are to non-obvious opportunity and the more limited your chance of success in new vectors and relationships.

How to be held back by schleps and egos