Why Everything Must Start From Your Areas of Focus.
We’ve reached a rather special milestone this week. This is the 150th episode of the Working With… Podcast so I thought this week I would explain something important about how great productivity systems are built.
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Script
Episode 150
Hello and welcome to episode 150 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, in a little change from the usual format, today I want to explain how to build your very own productivity system from the basic foundations.
As with all building, it starts with solid foundations and most people’s productivity systems fall apart not because of a lack of discipline but because the foundations on which the system is built are not strong.
There are three essential parts to any productivity system. There is the daily level—the tasks you complete. There is the project level, the group of connected tasks that when completed results is a finished project and then there is the areas of focus—the foundations of the system.
Now, It does not matter about the app you are using, it does not matter what industry you are working in. What matters are the foundations on which your whole system is built. I actually think this is a weakness in the Getting Things Done methodology. In the GTD book, there is a lot of stuff about collecting, managing your stuff and creating file folders for the different projects you create as a result of what you collected, but there is very little on why you are collecting that stuff. GTD focuses too much on the daily and project level and not enough on the foundational level.
You see, everything begins with your areas of focus or areas of responsibility. (There are many different ways of describing these). Essentially what this means are the very things you consider to be important in your life.
For most people, these will be things like:
Family and relationships
Your career
Your health
Your spirituality
Personal development
Life experiences — the places you want to visit, the things you want to experience.
Your finances
And your purpose in life.
There are more, but essentially most people would consider these areas of life as being important.
Now the funny thing is each of these areas will have a different level of importance depending on where you are in your life. If you are in your twenties, your relationships, career and life experiences are likely to be your top priorities. In your thirties, your family, life experiences and career. In your forties, it’s likely to be your personal development, finances and purpose in life. Fifties; finances will be near the top, your health and your family and so on. It changes with us and we are all different so the mix will be different for each of us.
But wherever you are in life, if you have not got these down, your system will be built on a foundation of sand. You will have no direction, no levels of importance that match where you are in life and so you will be operating from the level of your projects. Essentially your daily to-do list will be just that. A daily to-do list of tasks that are not connected in any way to what is really important to you.
And if you don’t know what your areas of focus are, where will your projects generally come from? Your work projects are likely to come from your company and boss. Your family projects will be a compromise with your partner. Only about a quarter of your projects will be self-generated, so you operate your daily life on other people’s agendas.
And if you are operating from the task level, then almost all your time is spent on small insignificant gains, fire fighting and other people’s requests. Rarely, if ever, do you do anything for your long-term self.
I’ve noticed another problem with operating a system from a project or task level. You will never be satisfied with your apps either. You will be constantly changing them, playing around with dangerous apps like Notion where there are so many bells and whistles you are led to believe that if only you can find the right database, then everything will start to work for you. It won’t, of course, because the app is never a substitute for what is important to you.
What apps you use is not important. What really matters is you have a place where your areas of focus are written down and that can be anywhere. A notebook, a simple notes app, or Notion, Evernote, OneNote or Apple Notes. It really doesn’t matter where you write these down. All that matters is you have them written down. So apps like Notion can be great, but only if you use them so they serve you instead of the other way round.
And that means you start by clearly defining your areas of focus.
Start with the framework of:
Family and relationships
career
health
spirituality
Personal development
Life experiences
finances
And purpose in life.
Now, the reason you start here is that all your projects and goals need to start from here. What do I mean by that?
Well, any project given to you by your boss, will be related to your career area. If you do a great job in doing your part of the project, you will help advance your career.
If you decide you want to learn a new skill or a foreign language, these could be related to your personal development or your career or both. Saving money will be related to your finances, embarking on a regular fitness programme is related to your health and so on.
So building your system from the foundation of your areas of focus creates a solid foundation on which to build your goals and your projects.
So what do you put in your areas of focus? Well, here you want to be writing out a sentence or two on what is important to you. For example, your family and relationships could be something like:
“I provide a stable, caring and loving home for my family and I am always there for my friends and family when they need me.”
For your career, you can write out the kind of employee or employer you want to be. Perhaps write out where you want your career to go.
What you will notice is your areas of focus are like your big overreaching goals and values.
Looking back over my own productivity journey, the first book on productivity I read was a book by a gentleman called Hyrum Smith called 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management. It’s a great book and is still available today.
The book begins with getting you to identify your governing values. Before identifying your goals and then your tasks. (Sound familiar?)
I also studied Tony Robbins’ time management system which is explained in his course Time of Your Life. Again, where does it start? It starts with your areas of focus, your life’s purpose, goals and of course your values.
All great systems begin at your areas level because without knowing what your values, life goals and what is important to you is, you will always be operating at a superficial level. You will feel unfulfilled and your days will pass in a blur of “what the hell happened today?”
Now, I don’t know what system Elon Musk uses, but watch any interview with him and you can see he is operating from his values. In particular, he’s operating at his life purpose level. Everything he does is focused on achieving his life’s purpose. To colonise Mars. Space X will provide him with the means to get to Mars. The Boring Company will provide him with the tools to build a way to sustainably live on Mars, and Teslar will provide a way to transport people around Mars.
Steve Jobs was the same. He operated at his areas of focus level. To provide tools for creative people to change to world for the better. His values were clearly centred around simplicity, ease of use and beauty. The whole Think Different campaign was built around what Steve Jobs valued most.
“The people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”
If you’ve never seen the original ad that Apple recorded with Steve’s voice saying the above quote you should. You can hear the passion, the drive and purpose in his voice. I’ve put a link in the show notes for you… Well worth a minute of your time.
Now, if your projects and daily tasks are not being driven from your areas of focus you are not going to be motivated to do either a good job or complete them. It’s the same with your goals. If your goals are not built on your areas of focus you are just not going to motivated enough to keep going when things get boring, difficult and monotonous.
Let’s take an example.
If you have in your health area of focus a sentence that states:
“I take care of my health and maintain a high level of fitness so I can continue to enjoy playing with my kids and grandkids long into my life”
And one day, you notice your waistline has expanded a little and it feels like an effort to get up a flight of stairs. That should alert you to your area of focus on health.
Now you can create a goal that will reduce your weight down to a level you are happy with, change your lifestyle a little so you move more and find more time to exercise.
Because that goal is coming from an area of focus you have identified as being important to you, you are much more likely to stick with it.
However, let’s say you are happy with your weight, and fitness is not something you particularly enjoy, but your co-workers persuade you to join them in a fitness and weight loss drive.
When you are feeling hungry a week or two into the drive and it’s raining outside but you are supposed to go out for a thirty-minute walk, how likely are you going to stick with your plan? Not likely. You just won’t have the motivation because the goal is not coming from your areas of focus. (Unless one of your values is related to being the best at everything you do—that would give you the motivation to complete the goal)
This is one of the reasons I spent time in my Time Sector course getting you to write out your core work—the work that is important to you. It’s also why the Time Sector System has a unique, dedicated folder for ‘recurring areas of focus’. These are the tasks that if you do consistently every day, week or month you are maintaining the areas of your life you identified as being important to you. It is such an important part of building a solid, sustainable productivity system.
So I urge you to take a little time this week to really think about your areas of focus. Write them down in your notes app, journal or notebook. I’ve given you a list in this podcast of where you can start with your areas but feel free to add others. We are all different but we all have one thing in common, to live a life of fulfilment, joy and happiness you need to be spending more of your valuable time nurturing and growing at your areas of focus and values level, not the projects and daily task level.
If you have a strong set of motivating and—more importantly, true to you—areas of focus, then 90% of what you do each day will be fulfilling and you will not be ending your day asking “what the hell happened today?”
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you found it motivating enough for you to begin writing out your areas of focus. Last week, I wrote a blog post on this topic and again, I’ve linked that in the show notes. In that post, I shared a few diagrams that show you how a productivity system should be working. Take a look, it will help you with your areas of focus development.
Now go build that fulfilling life.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.