The Year of Focus and Intentionality

Every year for the past three years I have been giving my years themes. The purpose of this is to create a central motif in which I base a lot of my priorities on for the year. Of course my foundational belief system is the core through which I base a lot of my decisions on, but when thinking about short-term decisions, I utilize these ‘yearly themes’ to create focus and filter out noise that won’t serve my overall mission for the year.

This upcoming year, 2020, I have a few things I want to accomplish but my main my goal is to increase and strengthen 1) my ability to focus on tasks for an extended period of time and 2) being more intentional and dedicated to the things I set as my passions and priorities. All this is to ensure higher impact to all the teams and people I work with.

The reason why I chose this theme is because I notice, year after year, the high-performers I know — personally or that I read about — all have this common ability and skillset they share in that when they sit down to work on something they have this innate ability to just focus on it. They filter so much of the world out that it’s amazing the intense focus they are able to dedicate to the task at hand.

In a world of instant notifications, social media gratification, and everyone and everything vying for your attention it can be extremely difficult to remain dedicated to this cause. Try for a set period of time to just focus on something without having the urge to check your phone, the time, look outside, be distracted by conversations or otherwise. It’s hard.

My theme this year is to:

• Increase my ability to focus on something
• Be more intentional and dedicated to my passions and priorities

By doing so, it will allow me to:

1. Strengthen the relationships I care about the most
2. Immerse myself in the activities and task that will bring the most dividends
3. Make me stronger in the areas of focus I want:

• I want to become a stronger leader in delegation and following up to ensure goals are being met. I plan to do this by keeping track of every delegated task out there with associated timeline and using part of my 20 minutes for every job I have to follow up on that.
• Stronger technologist. Publishing more works on what different technology is, how it can be used for everyday people, and promoting more of my own code into GitHub. I plan to do this by setting study time every week (reading books, watching courses/lectures online, attending events, and reviewing my notes for each) then publishing 1 long form paper per week (800+ words) on a subject I’m interested in, and promoting my code up to Github also once per week.
• Stronger understanding in the financial markets and having opinions on what different world events can signal. I plan to do this by reading more on world events, grasping a better understanding of what happens, writing down my thoughts, and running these by the experts I interact with.
• Stronger interpersonal relationships in the workplace, and in personal life. I plan to do this by having 1 day per week where I call 1 friend to catch up
• Meeting more diverse thoughts and ideas in everyday life. I plan to do this by having a weekly coffee chat with a new person, and attending/hosting at least 1 meetup event per month.
• Elevate my health and fitness to levels I haven’t seen before. I plan to do this by getting a personal trainer and attend at least 1–2 classes besides my own workouts.

4. Bring a significantly deeper self-awareness to all aspects of my career, personal life, and personal health.

My plan to increase my focus, follows this hypothesis:

Like a muscle, if I exercise my ability to focus on one task by ‘working it out’ twice a day, then ‘testing’ it out once a week, before really challenging it once every 6-months, I will come out with a championship-caliber focus that will allow me to focus on tasks for hours at a time with minimal fatigue, increased performance, and increase the time it takes me to complete tasks.

The idea behind this is that experiment is that, like an athlete, if I work out doing 2-a-days, practicing for the game that week, having some rest time built-in, I can do things like take 3.5 hour tests (like the GRE that I’m currently working on taking) and come out with a high-score, minimal fatigue, and higher speed to completion.

This focus will intromit me to entrance into a world of greater intentionality and priority setting.

The exercises I will be using to increase this focus:

Going back to writing down my plans for the day with time stamps and following up end of day with what went well, what didn’t, and how I could improve. Writing 200 words of thought per day, posting more on social media, dedicating a minimum of hyper-focused twenty minutes to every single one of my commitments per day and coming out with an actionable plan.

Pro-tip: While a lot of top-performers may not use any music and simply work by mentally filtering noise out, I find that a really good soundtrack can permit you increased concentration via physical aid: Something about the headphones even just being in and slightly drowning out exterior noise helps, then the right music that just allows you to immerse yourself is great. For me, the focus genre on Spotify is amazing. Specifically, the All-Nighter playlist has been my go to for the last 5 months. Whenever I don’t feel particularly strong-willed to just mentally focus and drown out noise I stick my Airpods in and get to work. Works really really well.

With a new job starting in January, the role of President of the Board for one of the largest non-profits in the South Metro Denver area, my Podcast relaunching, my real-estate plays taking shape, and my technology businesses growing, delivering impact is the greatest outcome I am hoping to achieve and I believe increasing my focus and intentionality will help deliver the results I want.