{"id":16925,"date":"2025-01-25T08:19:30","date_gmt":"2025-01-25T16:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=16925"},"modified":"2025-01-20T14:25:41","modified_gmt":"2025-01-20T22:25:41","slug":"how-life-of-focus-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/25\/how-life-of-focus-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesson Four: How Life of Focus Works"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Monday, Cal Newport and I are reopening Life of Focus<\/a> for a new session. Before we do that, I\u2019d like to take this chance to explain how Life of Focus works\u2014since it is a little different from what most people have come to expect from online courses\u2014and share how I think about designing courses to encourage behavior change.<\/p>\n

The classic course is all about providing information. There\u2019s a syllabus with a list of content; a bunch of lectures where the ideas, facts and concepts are conveyed; and finally, there\u2019s an exam to test if you remember everything you were taught.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with this model for many subjects. In many fields, information is what\u2019s missing, so taking some time to learn is the best action.<\/p>\n

However, from nearly two decades developing online courses, I\u2019ve often been disappointed with how the classic approach to structuring a course translates to action. The problem is that a lot of information, on its own, rarely translates to concrete behavioral change. A course on nutrition, for instance, will give you tons of useful concepts and ideas about eating better\u2014but it may not actually change how you eat, which is the ultimate goal of most people.<\/p>\n

When Cal Newport and I started designing Life of Focus, we knew this was going to be a potential issue in our course. Cal had recently published Deep Work<\/em> and Digital Minimalism<\/em>. Most of our prospective students had either read these books or followed Cal\u2019s blog or podcast and were already familiar with his calls for increasing focus in work and life.<\/p>\n

We knew that people attending the course didn\u2019t need more exhortations to turn off their email when doing deep work or lessons about the neuroscience of attentional processing. Instead, we designed the course to guide them through specific steps to create new working behaviors, and to have follow-through so those behaviors could become lifelong habits.<\/p>\n

The Format of an Action-Centered Course<\/h2>\n

As a result of this, Life of Focus (and my more recent course, Foundations) follows a different model than what we typically think of as a course.<\/p>\n

To start, the course is organized into three monthly challenges. Rather than putting the lessons first with the homework as an optional bonus (let\u2019s face it, most people who take online courses rarely do the assignments),\u00a0we put taking action to improve our focus first, and then provide regular lessons to remind and reinforce those actions as they are already underway.<\/p>\n

The three challenges for Life of Focus are: <\/p>\n