Essentialism (XXIX): Execute: Focus

"Life is available only in the present moment.  If you abandon the present moment, you cannot life the moments of your life deeply." - Thich Nhat Hanh

Greg McKeown starts this chapter with a story of Coach Larry Gelwix, who coached the Highland High School Rugby team to 418 wins, 10 losses, and twenty national championships over 36 years.  Coach Gelwix has a simple question which, conveniently, is a simply acronym for win as well:  "What's Important Now?"

This helps his players focus - instead of getting caught up in what just happened (the past) or worrying if they will win (the future), it helps them focus on the play they are in "right now" (McKeown's emphasis).  It also allows the players to stay focused on how they are playing:

"Larry believes a huge part of winning is determined by whether the players are focused on their own game or their opponent's game.  If the players start thinking about the other team they lose focus.  Consciously or not, they start wanting to play the game the other team is playing.  They get distracted and divided.  By focusing on their game in the here and now, they can all unite around a single strategy.  This level of unity makes execution of their game plan relatively frictionless."

Coach Gelwix makes a difference between being beaten and losing.  Being beaten means they were better than his team.  Losing means that the team lost focus on what was essential.

To operate at your highest level of contribution, says McKeown, we have to deliberately tune in to what is important in the here and now.

For the Essentialist, there is only the now.  There is not the past with its mistakes and errors or the future with its possibilities or worrying about the things we cannot control.  There is only being focused and present in the current moment and on what we are doing now.

He revisits the Ancient Greek concepts of time, something we have touched on before here as well:  chronos, the simple passage of time, and kairos, those moments in time that are right, opportune, different.  The way of the Essentialist is to tune into the present, into the kairos moments, to those things that are truly important right now.

To be focused is to be present in the moment.  To this end, McKeown points out that while some multi-tasking may be possible, what is not possible is multi-concentration or multi-focus.  We can only focus on one thing at a time.

So how do we focus?  How do we be in the now?

- Figure Out What Is Important Right Now: "When faced with so many tasks and obligations that you can't figure out which to tackle first, stop.  Take a deep breath.  Get present in the moment and ask yourself what is the most important this very second - not what's important tomorrow or even an hour from now.  If you're not sure, make a list of everything vying for your attention and cross off anything that is not important right now."

- Get The Future Out Of Your Head:  A helpful practice McKeown mentions here is taking a moment and listing things which are essential - but not right now-  out of his head and onto a piece of paper.  This helps him to focus by not losing the ideas and knowing that these were now things that he did not need to act on.

- Prioritize:  After prioritizing the "Right Now" list, work on those first, one at a time until they are done.  This allows focus on those things.

McKeown quotes the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who spends an hour a day drinking tea with other monks:

"Suppose you are drinking a cup of tea.  When you hold the cup, you might like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your body, and you become fully present.  And when you are truly there, something else is also there -life, represented by the cup of tea.  In that moment you are real, and the cup of tea is real.  You are not lost in the past, in the future, in your projects, in your worries.  You are free from all of your afflictions.  And in that state of being free, you enjoy your tea.  That is the moment of happiness, and of peace."

Pay attention, says McKeown, to the kairos moments of our day.  Write them down, think of what triggered that moment and what you brought from it.  If you can recognize that trigger, you can try to re-create it.

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Application:

Typically at this point I would write "As long-time readers of my blog know...".  But that would yet another rehashing of a comment that we have discussed for a long, long time: I have trouble focusing.  Instead, it is perhaps more useful to consider the wider world around us.

And how that world does everything in its power to prevent focusing.

We live in an age of distraction. Mathew Crawford in his book The World Beyond Your Head refers to the loss of what he calls The Attention Commons, that space that used to exist where people were effectively free from having their attention grabbed by advertising or a constant stream of noise and images.  Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows quotes research that notes that at the best of times, our minds can hold 3-5 thoughts in working memory - and thanks to the wonder of the InterWeb and the plasticity of our brains, we are literally becoming unable to concentrate on deep issues.  The very fact that we can be in a meeting with people speaking and a computer and two cell phones in front of us, checking each for updates as we move from screen to screen, never really in any one conversation - and that this is acceptable behavior - should give a clue about how the modern world values focus.

With this sort of avalanche against us, the ability to focus in the modern world is almost a superpower.

What is the best way I have been dealing with it?  Very old methods.  Do one thing at a time and, to the best of your ability, remove all other options to multi-focus (e.g., write and check e-mail or even, for me, write and listen to something).  Do things via analog (which almost by default is doing one thing at at time).  And try, more and more, to do less and less via the InterWeb.

Focusing in the modern environment is not impossible.  It is just very, very hard.