When I read Taylor Pearson’s title to his article “A Single Word Summary of 188 Books on Entrepreneurship”, I instantly knew the one word he was talking about. It had been something floating around in my head for a while and he was describing exactly what I was thinking.

Through all my readings, it seems that the one factor that truly makes the difference is focus. Whether it’s Stoicism of focusing on what you can control, or mindfulness where you focus on the present, or Darren Hardy’s one key to success of reducing the things you focus on, or looking at flow triggers laid out by Steven Kotler of knowing exactly what your working on, or the productivity hacks of any successful person, it seems that focus is at the core of it.

It doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you are focusing on the right thing. Not having focus at the core of what you’re doing is liking being a chicken with it’s head cut off. You could be running really fast and covering a lot of ground, but not really going anywhere or making any true progress.

It’s such an important factor, that I wanted to dive into it more; break it down a bit and look at ways to improve it. I tend to immediately look at things as a system, where I can lay it out, look at it and tweak it to improve it.

Looking at focus, I realized there are two different kinds of focus, and they influence each other heavily. I’ll dive into those next, and after that, I’ll describe my two pronged strategy to be more focused.

I’m constantly working at this, so although I’ll lay this out like I know exactly what I’m doing… I don’t. And sometimes I don’t even follow my own advice, which always makes me think of Sam Harris’ quote:
[Tweet “Wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice”]

The Two Different Types of focus

To me, I see two different kinds of focus. The first I call macro focus, which obviously gives the second kind the name micro focus.

Macro focus is what I call you’re north star values, which I’ve referred to a couple times before. The short explanation for north star values is basically taking a look at where you’d like to be in 2, 5, and 10 years, then picking out the patterns from those.

I think having a five year plan is a bit ridiculous, but having values and principals you’d like to live by isn’t. These are your north stars. Since we live in a quickly changing world and you really have no idea where you’ll be in five years (or even one year), it’s important to have values that you can use as the guide when making live decisions that will take you one direction or the other.

Having these values allows to you slowly move backwards to present day, to where you can finally ask yourself the question, what do I do right now, to make sure those values become more present in my life.

For example, one of the values for me is freedom. This is freedom of time, money, and location. I can then work backwards to figure out what I need to do now to get more freedom in my life.

Within the realm of macro focus, I also include my quarterly goal setting. That’s how far back I work my values to figure out decisions. I think 12 weeks at a time is a really good schedule to actually set up goals that you can break down and figure out what to do weekly, then daily to get there.

With figuring out these North Star values, and breaking them down into quarterly goals, I’m able to maintain my macro focus on a day-to-day basis. I’m not a chicken running around with my head cut off. When I put my head down to work and grind through another quarter, I know exactly the direction I’m heading.

I can then pick my head up at the end of each quarter to evaluate how well I focused, and it that quarter was focused correctly. If so, I set up for the next quarter and keep going with slight improvements.

If it turns out I was out of focus on my North Star values, I adjust course and plan out the next quarter better than the last.

Breaking down the macro focus into quarterly goals, which then can get broken down into weekly tasks and then daily next actions, gets us to the micro focus.

Micro focus is what gets me through my day-to-day life. It’s what makes sure that when I wake up, I’m able to move forward a little bit each day. If I am distracted all day, then it means my micro focus wasn’t good.

Micro focus is where my two pronged strategy comes into play. The macro focus comes from a good, clear understanding of your north star values. But the micro focus is a daily battle.

My Two Pronged Approach to Micro Focus

So I’ve broken up my focus strategy into two different prongs. They are external and internal focus strategies.

The way I like to describe it is a bowling analogy. The external straggles are the bumpers on the bowling alley. Even if you are a terrible bowler, you can still get down the alley and hit some pins (Theoretically. I’ve actually gotten a gutter ball before with bumpers up…).

The internal strategy is how good you are as a bowler. If you are a stellar bowler, you never need the bumpers. However, most of us are not great “focusers”. We live in a world where it’s harder than ever to focus. It’s almost like the world around you is pulling for you to constantly bowl gutter balls. This is why the bumpers are so important.

My External Focus Strategy

The way I put up the bumpers in my life are probably pretty obvious, but a lot of the time people don’t follow them and I even forget to.

The first one is to use the Pomodoro technique for my work. I take my next action (derived from my north star values broken down) and decide it’s what I’m going to work on. I put that next action in places that I will always see it.

One is at the top bar of my computer

The other is whenever I open a new tab in Chrome (I wish Safari had one, since I use Safari on the go to keep my battery alive longer).

Momentum is the plugin that does this

I downloaded the Pomodoro One app for Mac, which sits nicely in my top bar. You can customized it to your preferred time. Mine is 50 minutes of work and 10 minute breaks.

I try to use these 10 minute breaks to get away from my computer and do something to improve my energy or focus. Like stretching or cleaning up around my desk, since cleaning is something that I will do to procrastinate.

Also, while I work, I turn off all distractions. This means I don’t have anything that sends me notifications open. I tend to keep Skype open though, since that’s where people reach me in case of an emergency and most of our communication is through Asana.

I put my phone on airplane mode and keep it far away from me. I don’t keep Gmail open, which I usually don’t check until 11:30am and then again at 4pm. Inbox Pause is great for this, but is again another thing I lose when switching to Safari on the go.

More things I do to avoid distractions is use Evernote / Instapaper to try to keep only timely things in front of me. If something comes up that appears it will be useful, I usually clip it to Evernote to reference later when I’m on that topic. If it’s something I’d like to read soon, I send it to Instapaper, which then automatically downloads to my Kindle once a week.

That way, I know I didn’t lose the interesting article I came across and continue to focus on my important task for that 50 minute span.

On top of this, I always have a way to keep quick notes that I won’t lose. I do this by having Evernote in my top bar:

The hotkey for this is ^?k. Then command enter saves it into my “To-Be Sorted” folder in Evernote, so I can address it later. I have my Evernote system set up in GTD fashion, so I never lose a thought or information to reference, and can always know my next action.

While these are a lot of bumpers, I also try to optimize my environment in more ways. Music choice is important to me. I like to have no lyrics while doing creative work, such as writing. Lyrics are ok if the music is in the background and muffled with other noises, like working in a coffee shop.

But if I’m writing, I actually play the same non-lyrical song on repeat. It keeps me in the zone and not distracted. And I’ve used this song enough at this point to where my brain is triggered to think “time to write” when I start playing it.

Another bumper in my focus strategy is to use a standing desk. I started this in college and quickly realized I’m way less likely to lose energy while working if I’m standing. It’s harder to get into a comfortable sleepy state while standing up.

My current set up looks like this:

I typically only stand half the day though, as I like to venture out to coffee shops in the afternoon to vary my environment. It also allows me to be in a “power stance” which actually has been shown to increase testosterone, which is a good energy source if you can keep it focused.

My surrounding area needs to be pretty clean as well. I don’t really function like Einstein where you keep a messy desk for inspiration. I was never a clean, organized person until I started to work from home. Now I know I’ll clean to procrastinate, so I need to make sure there isn’t much for me to do in the first place.

This about wraps up my external strategy for focus.

My Internal Factors for Focus

So the internal factors are all about improving my brain’s ability to focus. This is where some more interesting things come into play.

The first factor is not so interesting. It’s simply meditation. There are tons of studies at this pointing linking meditation to higher levels of focus. I am currently using a combination of Headspace and Isochronic tones. I’ve been meditating now for about 5 years, but the first year was on an off. It’s now something that I do at least 5 days a week consistently.

If you’ve never meditated before, I’d recommend checking out the free 10 day’s that Headspace gives you. It’s enough time to really feel some of the difference that meditation can make in your life.

Going along with that, anything that improves my cognitive ability is on the table for improving my internal focus strategy.

This includes “brain training” with the dual n-back training, which has been shown to improve cognition function.

This is a great place for “bio-hacking” as well. For example, I have Bulletproof coffee with L-Theanine every morning (L-Theanine is the calming agent in green tea). This allows me to be high energy from the fats, caffeine, being in ketosis, and then having the focus that L-Theanine brings in.

I experiment a bit with nootropics as well, but this is a field that I’m looking into more at this time. Some of the things that I’ll be looking more into over the coming year are micro-dosing with LSD, Modfinil, Adderall, and other drugs (natural or synthetic) that improve cognition. I’ll be writing about nootropics more in the future, but a great resource to get more into them is Smart Drug Smarts and BulletProof Executive.

The last internal trigger that I utilize is trying to intentionally effect my subconscious. While that may sound like some woo-woo stuff, I think it works and I don’t have much science to back it up.

I read Think and Grow Rich over a year ago, and decided “Fuck it, I’ll give it a try,” and haven’t looked back. So everyday when I wake up, I go over my goals. They are written in very specific ways. I’ll be writing more about goal setting in the future, but I think there are ways to change the way you naturally look at the world.

If you focus on certain things enough, I believe the confirmation bias starts to take place. The same as if you buy a new car, all the sudden it seems like everyone has that car. Do they really? Nope. But it’s what’s in your mind so it’s what you are now seeing everywhere even though that specific car was around the whole time.

I think reading over my goals in the morning, over time, can change the way my subconscious sees the world and can break down some of the limitations we naturally put on ourselves.

My friend Chris told me this metaphor about us and our subconscious that I think works well. Basically, our conscious selves are little ants on top of an elephant. The elephant is our subconscious. And no matter how conscious you are about trying to decide the direction of your life, unless you figure out how to move that elephant you really don’t have any control.

What he elaborated this with was thinking about weight loss. Do you think “I’m an overweight person trying to lose weight” or “I’m an athlete who has gained too much weight”.

Conclusion

Focus is one of the most important aspects we can start to work on. I’m always trying to refine every factor of focus. I have weekly and quarterly reviews to evaluate this and to ask questions like “Are my north star values still correct and clear?”, “Do I need to adjust course at all?”, and “When I think about my quarterly goals, do I think “Fuck Yeah?”.

Let me know if you have any tips or tricks to add in the comments. I know I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t even fully follow my advice everyday.