{"id":17425,"date":"2025-07-01T06:19:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T14:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=17425"},"modified":"2025-11-13T11:19:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T19:19:05","slug":"focus-day-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/01\/focus-day-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Focus &#8211; Day One"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the first day of the tenth month of my year-long <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/myprojects\/foundations-project\/\">Foundations<\/a> project. This month\u2019s theme is focus.<\/p>\n<p>Focus is a complement to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/06\/productivity-opening-update\/\">productivity<\/a>, the second month, which emphasized creating systems that capture, organize and plan your efforts. But this system-building has an obvious weakness: it doesn\u2019t decide what needs to be done and dedicate the attention needed to do it.<\/p>\n<p>This weakness became apparent in running the <a href=\"https:\/\/join.ingeniumcourses.com\/foundations\/\">companion course<\/a> to this project. While many of the students enjoyed the second month of the program, it was also the focus area that brought up the greatest difficulties for many students.<\/p>\n<p>This surprised me. I had anticipated the effort required for daily exercise, the complexity of a dietary overhaul, or even the technical fussiness of money management to be harder units. In retrospect, the difficulty makes perfect sense: capturing and organizing to-do items skips over the difficult work of choosing which you\u2019ll actually do (and which you\u2019ll deliberately procrastinate on), but it doesn\u2019t force you to do any of them.<\/p>\n<p>Focus, then, was missing.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How Do You Focus?<\/h2>\n<p>Focus is a combination of a philosophy, a skill and key habits:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>As a philosophy, focus is about accepting finitude and being comfortable with leaving things undone.<\/strong> All choices to work on one project are implicit rejections of everything else. All decisions to stick to a book, an exercise plan, a career move or a relationship confront all the other alternatives. If you haven\u2019t fully accepted this part of human nature, focus is impossible\u2014you\u2019ll constantly be chasing the other thing you could have done and fail to focus on anything.<\/li>\n<li><strong>As a skill, focus is about resisting the impulse to switch.<\/strong> It\u2019s about resisting the temptation to rethink your goal or project, to change your plans midway, to check your phone, email or news for a little break. People who are good at focusing are low in impulsiveness, which is partly a hardwired psychological trait and partly downstream of our attentional environment.<\/li>\n<li><strong>As a habit, focus is upheld by routines that shape your attention environment and center your goals<\/strong>: daily reviews, deep work rituals, putting your phone in another room, going to a space without internet to work, booking time with yourself in your own calendar, and so on.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The multifaceted nature of this foundation has made it hard for me to decide which keystone habit ought to be central for this month. My initial guess was for daily deep work, but I\u2019m now reluctant to make that the core pillar. This is partly because it treads on my other <a href=\"https:\/\/join.ingeniumcourses.com\/lifeoffocus\/\">course<\/a> co-taught with Cal Newport. But mostly, it\u2019s because my experience with students in the second month of the <a href=\"https:\/\/join.ingeniumcourses.com\/foundations\/\">Foundations<\/a> course suggests that deciding seems to loom even larger than simply putting in extended time to do the work.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, I\u2019m going to experiment with a few habits this month before making my final recommendation for the class. <span id='easy-footnote-1-17425' class='easy-footnote-margin-adjust'><\/span><span class='easy-footnote'><a href='https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/01\/focus-day-one\/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-17425' title='As noted previously, I\u2019m working three months ahead of the class, but publishing these essays synchronously with it. I\u2019ll have made up my mind before the students reach this month in the class.'><sup>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">My Plans for Improving Focus<\/h2>\n<p>I consider this month\u2019s area one of my strongest foundations. Not because I\u2019m immune to distraction or procrastination (I do plenty of both), nor because I work especially long hours or obsessively (I do at times, but on average I have a modest workweek), but simply because choosing projects to undertake, sticking with them and finishing them as planned is something I\u2019ve felt comfortable with for decades.<\/p>\n<p>As such, I don\u2019t really anticipate major improvements to this area, and I\u2019m not sure exactly what improvement would look like. If anything, I\u2019ve always struggled more with the periphery\u2014I have few problems getting central tasks done, but odd errands and low-priority minutia can sit on my to-do list for months. I always have to consider the possibility that my personality defect is too much focus\u2014tunnel vision that forecloses spontaneity and improvisation.<\/p>\n<p>However, I\u2019m still eager to work on focus this month, both for the possibility of unexpected discoveries in revisiting the research, and also for trying out concrete habits to see which may be most useful for the students in the course.<\/p>\n<p>As of right now, here are the tentative habits I\u2019m going to play around with this month as I try to narrow down which provide maximum efficacy for the least amount of extra burden in ordinary life:<\/p>\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Daily reviews. <\/strong>This was a suggestion in the productivity-focused second month, but many people didn\u2019t follow it. I suspect part of the reason is that many people\u2019s original reviews were too elaborate\u2014instead, a quick glance at the tasks and reshuffling the list may be better, if only to underscore which tasks are at the top (and which are not).<\/li>\n<li><strong>The \u201cMIT\u201d method.<\/strong> The Most Important Task method is to center your work on one key task at a time. You may not literally be able to work on it in every moment (interruptions intervene) but the idea of having only one task top-of-mind at any time can be a good focusing habit. When the task is done, create a new task.<\/li>\n<li><strong>\u201cWhat Three Things\u201d method.<\/strong> This is like the MIT method, but there are three tasks prioritized, instead of one. The idea here is to keep a very short list of priorities, across different timescales. This rewards a kind of focus, and is an encouragement to break down bigger projects into smaller tasks. Three things is few enough that the choice at any moment is relatively constrained, but it also affords more flexibility than only having one task, allowing you to adapt your work to your current energy levels or situation.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>This list is tentative. It may be that some other habit or technique is more appropriate\u2014especially given that I may be atypical in applying this advice\u2014so I\u2019m glad to hear what other people find that works for them.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Reading and Research<\/h2>\n<p>This is a topic I\u2019ve already researched fairly heavily, so I expect this month to be largely re-reading. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted\/dp\/0349413681\/\">Deep Work<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Indistractable-Control-Your-Attention-Choose\/dp\/194883653X\">Indistractible<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/Focus-Hidden-Excellence-Daniel-Goleman\/dp\/0062114867\/\">Focus<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/First-Things-Stephen-R-Covey\/dp\/0684802031\">First Things First<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown\/dp\/0804137404\">Essentialism<\/a> are good popular books, and I plan to re-read Kahneman\u2019s <em>Attention and Effort<\/em> and revisit a few cognitive science monographs on attention.<\/p>\n<p>The only major topic of scholarly research where I feel a major blindspot is ADHD research. I\u2019m always a little hesitant to comment on clinical disorders owing to my outsider status. But given the sky-high rates of self-diagnosis, I think it\u2019s a gap I ought to fill in my own knowledge, if only to be able to redirect people to more credible sources of research than the flotsam that drifts around online.<\/p>\n<p>_ _ _<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>Jumping forward in time (I write these updates three months in advance to give my team time to prepare the course content), I can say that the keystone habit I ended up selecting for this month is the idea of picking a daily highlight&#8211;a technique I learned from Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky&#8217;s book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/Make-Time-Focus-Matters-Every\/dp\/0525572422\">Make Time<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the first day of the tenth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month\u2019s theme is focus. Focus is a complement to productivity, the second month, which emphasized creating systems that capture, organize and plan your efforts. But this system-building has an obvious weakness: it doesn\u2019t decide what needs to be done and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17425","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-personal-development","7":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Focus - Day One - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/01\/focus-day-one\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Focus - Day One - Scott H Young\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today is the first day of the tenth month of my year-long Foundations project. 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