A couple of years ago, I adopted a four letter acronym as my personal guide in life. It seemed so simple at the time. This little four-letter guy was going to make all my problems go away. I was going to get things done. I was going to keep the house clean. Laundry folder. Broken things would be fixed right away. I would never miss an appointment again.

It sort of started as a New Year’s resolution type of thing, and now I’m haunted by those four letters almost everyday. Needless to say, it’s been a process.

F.C.E.C.

A way to live, or to drive myself crazy…in a slow and deliberate manner.

Rather than spill the beans all at once, today is the first of four posts on F.C.E.C. Why four, you ask? Because there are four letters in the acronym. It was pretty much a no-brainer for me to figure that one out. Like I’ve mentioned before, this really isn’t all that hard, just a bunch of common sense with a lot of words wrapped around it.

So what is the F-word. No, not that one that gets kids mouths washed out with soap (anybody still do that?). Not the one that gets gasps in polite company.

F stands for Focus. Plain and simple. Focus. No matter what you’re going, planning on doing, or even wondering about doing, if you don’t focus you won’t go anywhere. I’ve got so many examples it’s not even funny.

You know those “goals” that people have (I’m using “people” generically, rather than always using the pronoun “I”)? They’re not goals if you don’t write them down or at least put them in a form you can refer to. They’re not going to happen if you don’t focus on them.

For me, I say I want to get healthier, lose weight, and get toned. But if I don’t focus on those things, I end up sitting down in my comfy office chair and writing blog posts about all sorts of other things.

Focus

When you look it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the kind of focus I’m talking about “directed attention” is the seventh definition. The other six are fine, and make great metaphors for the kind of focus I’m talking about, but “directed attention” is what I want to concentrate on.

I touched on the subject in post 9, Be where you are. But concentrating on the thing you are doing is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to true focus. You have to have a single-minded concentration on the project, task, or whatever that you’re working on. If it’s planning a project, you need to really get into it. Immerse yourself in it. Try to dispel the distractions. This is even more important when you are actually doing the task. You’ve got to get into the task wholeheartedly.

I used to love to tell people that I was the best multi-tasker out there. I could handle inputs and requests from all the kids, my wife, my customers, my parents and everybody else simultaneously. People would ask “How do you do it” and I would smugly answer “Multitasking”.

So I’m older now. Some days I’m even wiser. And I’ve come to the conclusion that we really don’t multi-task. What we really do is switch from one task to another, really, really quickly. But there is a price to be paid when we do that switching. Your brain has to stop the focus on one task, store away something about it so you can pick it back up later, and then jump to the new task. When we “multi-task” we simply go through that process, jumping back and forth between tasks. If you’re fast as switching tasks, you look like you’re doing multiple things at once. But I contend that you’re not. You’re just really good at switching tasks.

Over time, I’ve decided that I’m great at what appears to be “multi-tasking”, but it comes at a very high price. The biggest part of the cost comes from quality of work. While I’m good at “multi-tasking”, that doesn’t mean that I’m exempt from having to do the stop, store, switch cycle. So I clutter up my brain with all these stored states so I can pick up that stopped task later on.

But a couple years ago I came up with F.C.E.C. and started to focus more on what I’m doing at the moment. This led me to a discovery that I could complete tasks faster when I applied focus. The other three parts of the acronym help, but you’ll have to wait to read about them.

What’s important here is that focus is essential, and must be the first step in getting things done. Dispensing with distractions and filling your consciousness with the thing at hand works so well for me.

I’m not perfect at it. When the kids are all home for the holidays we have twenty or more conversations going on, and I jump from one to the other just like I always have. But I’ve also taken to sitting down, one-on-one with many of the kids to really go deeper and find out what’s going on in their lives.

And that’s a payoff that, frankly, cannot be measured. When you focus on a person or a task the quality of the end result is so much better.

Try it out. Focus, and see what impact is has for you!