“What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore – plays in defining the quality of our life.” – Cal Newport

I’ve gotten up about 25 times while writing this article. Kids have started virtual learning at school, and there have been multiple troubleshooting questions. “What is my Google password?” “I can’t see the chat!” “How do I do this?” I then pause to text other moms with kids in the same classes. I get a call from my boss. One of my kids has a break and asks for a snack. My husband says from the other room, “Looks like a hurricane is coming.”

Research shows we get interrupted or distracted every three minutes on average. Our ability to focus, prior to the pandemic shift, was strained to say the least. According to Herbert Simon, a computer science and psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon, “Information consumes the attention of its recipients, and a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” He shared that in a conference on the impact of information technology in 1970. 

How do we get back our ability to focus? 

In Free to Focus, Michael Hyatt explains that the first step of gaining focus is to formulate or decide what you want. When I teach meditation, I tell people to ask themselves this very question. Ask yourself, “What do I want?”

I remember, upon getting my degree in college, I knew that the field in which I got that degree was not going to be my career. As a 22-year-old, I had no idea what I would do next. I knew I had a world ahead of me, and the number of options were overwhelming. I purchased a book called I Could Do Anything if I Only Knew What It Was. At nearly 40, my wants in life become clearer each day. 

The ability to focus on what we want creates a productive human. Michael Hyatt describes his book, Free to Focus, as a total productivity system. Productivity is not about getting more things done; it’s about getting the right things done.

In order to be more productive and more focused, you must STOP and know which direction to move in. It may seem counterintuitive to STOP in order to be productive, a word commonly associated with “GO.” You must STOP to formulate where you need to spend your focus. 

Hyatt says to ask yourself: What do we want from our productivity? What’s the purpose? What are the objectives?

In Free to Focus, Hyatt defines the true objective of productivity as freedom. Most people describe productivity as efficiency or success. The assumption is that being productive means working faster and that working faster is inherently better. However, when people try to work faster, they do so to simply cram more work in; the production increases, and the volume increases. At some point, the volume will outweigh the production possibility of the human or leave the human strained, stressed, and overworked.

When addressing a task, don’t ask, “How can I do this faster, easier, and/or cheaper?” Ask “Should I be doing this task at all?” Regarding efficiency, Hyatt mentions how we’re stuck on the proverbial hamster’s wheel, never making any real progress on our ever-growing list of projects and tasks.

The goal of productivity is freedom. Freedom comes from developing the ability to choose what you want to focus on. You want your work to solve actual problems in your world – and the freedom to be present with those you love and with the work or leisure you are doing. Productivity offers us the freedom to be spontaneous when spontaneity occurs and the freedom to do nothing if and when we choose to. By focusing on what we want, we can begin to formulate where our focus belongs and get the right things done.

So ask yourself, “What do I want?”