Yearly Theme (2022) - Focus

Following on from the my Year of Healthy Habits I was determined to continue on with the idea of yearly themes. I considered that one obvious benefit to the previous years' theme was an increased focus on many different things: hobbies, work, habits and mini-monthly-challenges.

Having started making some good progress in various areas of my life, I didn’t want this to stop. Making progress in anything, no matter how small, helps me to keep progressing and trying, so I didn’t want to lose any forward momentum with this theme idea.

An Intentional Focus

There have been a few episodes now where the #Cortex guys have mentioned the concept of ‘intentionality’ when it comes to time and time spent. It was brought up by Grey in reference to time tracking, where he wanted to track all of his time in an effort to find and reduce all ‘unintentional time’ (losing hours of your evening playing Factorio, for example…)

The idea of ‘intentionality’ of time really hit home with me, especially after the reasons that led me to the previous years theme, and the idea of the New Year’s theme was pretty clear: The Year of Focus.

A New Theme

The Year of Focus was an excellent theme for me as it was one that both built upon the work that I had done in the previous year, whilst also introducing some new concepts to work into the year as well.

So, this Year of Focus, what would it entail? Well, one of the main reasons to initially starting a new university course was my lack of focus and realising that I struggled to keep my attention on things as well as I used to. Wanting to improve my focus was one of the core ideals of last year but the theme ended up being a bit broader in scope, and an improved focus was a result of the theme, rather than the focal point.

As mentioned in the previous yearly theme post, the healthy habits theme worked really well and I was looking forward to being able to move that into this years theme. I also knew that I wanted to focus my focus (horrible phrasing) so that I could better concentrate and work on a smaller number of areas and, hopefully, having a greater impact in each of them.

The idea of the theme wasn’t just to increase my focus over a range of different areas, but to make a conscious effort to really focus on what I was doing at the time. Here’s where I get a little ‘spiritual’, but bare with me here.

Mindfulness

Due to a series of events last year, I had ended up seeing a counsellor for close to a year, which helped reduce a feeling of ‘drifting’ that I’d started feeling increasingly. This was a feeling that I’ve mentioned in the past and was one of the catalysts to the previous years' healthy habits. The counsellor was incredibly helpful and the things that we talked about and practised will hopefully stick with me for a while.

She was focused a lot on the mindfulness side of counselling which was something that I had encountered a little before and had practised a few times. It was good to get some more informed advice on and some good resources to refer too later on.

This isn’t something that I do a lot, but I think that the mindfulness practice is similar to what I was striving to achieve with the Year of Focus. Mindfulness isn’t trying to focus your mind, rather it’s trying to remove distractions and distracted thought from around you so that you can more clearly see/feel/think about the present.

Having been working on my focus for a while, I found the idea of mindfulness to be very helpful in letting go of things around me and helping to clean up my thoughts a bit.

The Guide to Focus

Around April this year I started to try and take some of the choice or decision making about my time away. The idea behind this was: by trying to allocate some of my time into blocks (strangely reminiscent of About A Boy) so that I could spend less time worrying about what it was that I was supposed to be doing and instead, once prompted, move onto that activity.

So, after reading a little more about this idea (I quite liked The Paradox of Choice by Dean Yeong) I decided to create what I called my Guide. The idea was to break my day up into broad chunks of time so that I could, at a glance, see what it was that past me thought I should be doing.

This wasn’t a fixed schedule, but rather a guide to pull my focus back a little if required. It was set up on my calendar so that I received a notification on my phone (when I look at my phone) and on my smart watch (when I wear it).

The idea of the guide was not for things like appointments but more like a daily time planner:

Exercise in the morning
Work during the day
Housework after work
Study (small chunk)
Free time (dinner, relaxing, gaming, etc)
Study (large chunk)
Project stuff (more focused free-time, set aside for things like this blog, programming and other things)
Free time

This was one of the most helpful outcomes of this years theme! I didn’t stick rigidly to it but it became increasingly useful as a way to help me focus my time better and made me feel better generally as it kept me on track to working through larger, more long-term, goals.

Year of Focus - Review

With the New Year fast approaching (and whilst listening to this years #Cortex Yearly Themes episode), the time had come to do a bit of a review.

As with lots of self-improvement style things, keeping up the momentum or habit over a long period of time can be challenging, especially when things in life change or unknown events crop up. I needed to refresh myself on my theme a few times and I found that I got knocked off of the path a few times by some irregular events: health events, family events, etc. Generally though, most of the year I managed to focus a bit more on a narrower scope and also apply more focus to whatever it was that I was doing at that time.

Whilst it was generally a good trend, I think that there were definitely times where I still felt as though I was drifting or that my concentration was wondering. However, I also found that it was easier to get back on track and also that having my thoughts wander wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but just something that I had to take note of. The following are a few examples of areas that had some improvement or noticeable changes.

Need For Distraction

As just mentioned, I noticed a lot more when my thoughts started to wander or my concentration was lacking and, instead of trying to pull myself back on track, I tried to allow for this and let myself lose focus. Some exercises that I found to help with this were:

Switching off radio/music in the car for any extended trips
Completing housework without any media to entertain me
Going out for meals without looking at phone

All of these were good to encourage some random thoughts and I found this semi-regular release of my focus really helpful to allow myself to concentrate more when I needed to.

Reduction of Choice

The Guide mentioned above was another excellent tool to help me maintain my focus throughout the days and weeks this year. Having pre-made some choices in my life helped me to focus as less consideration was given to smaller things such as:

What or when to eat (sticking to a similar meal plan/time throughout the year)
Sticking to my sleep/wakeup hours most days/weeks
Having a list of personal projects to work though, decided in advance, for my projects time
Regular culling any regular media lists (podcast subs, YouTube subs, Twitter followers, etc) kept my media consumption choices to a minimum

Specific No Screen Times

Over the years I’ve found that the more screen-time I have, the more my mind seems to retain an unfocused state (similar to what I mentioned in my first privacy post) when I spend time on the computer or phone before going to bed. I’m not sure if this is a result of unfocused time (endless Twitter scrolling, for example) or just the screens themselves, but I find that the more I reduce this time, the more I can both focus more and maintain a more regular sleep schedule.

The added benefit of this is that I find myself reading more and this has been an amazing outcome for me. I used to read a lot more than I have in recent years and returning to that has made me feel so much better.

Looking Forwards

As with all themes, resolutions and goals, some might stick around, some might fade away. If I had to keep only a subset of this years theme (rather than all of it), I’d keep the Guide that I put together. I think that this helped me stay on track more than anything else that I’ve achieved this year. I’d change it to be a little more ‘invasive’, so that it was harder to ignore, especially since my phone usage drops each year.

With the success of the last two years' themes, I need to now have a think over the next week or so and decide on what this years theme shall be…

My Year of Focus (2022)