Areas of Focus
The conventional way is to separate our ‘Personal’ vs. ‘Professional’ responsibilities first and cascade all related areas from there. I don’t like this separation. The term 'Areas of Responsibility' will be familiar to anyone who has ever come across productivity courses or todo list systems.
For me, there is no separation. Personal life should feed your profession life and vice versa.
With this thinking, over the years I developed a system where I separate all my areas of responsibility into a grid of 9 categories.
I have modified these many times as my thinking and systems changed over the years. The word choices, the titles, and what each area related to in regards to activities and tasks. And I arrived at something that translates to how my brain works.
I used to describe them with longer names and use fun language, such as calling my fitness area something goofy like “Olympic Athlete” or my Leisure area “Adventure Zone”. But these ended up over the long run detracting from the purpose of switching my focus between all the areas as I organized the things I wanted.
My prefer was to call these categories is 'areas of focus'.
They delineate an area of importance to me regardless of urgency. It's an area I decided I want to focus on continuously. These aren't that unique, we all have them. But I think the simple grid system works.
For example, “Create” isn’t a responsibility but it will hurt my spirit if I don’t spend time in creativity mode where new ideas get develop, a new problem is solved, or I am producing results or content out into the world. That's an area of focus and importance.
Here are my areas of focus:
- Fitness
- Nutrition
- Connect
- Business
- Cashflow
- Create
- Lifestyle
- Mindset
- Leisure
Every external demand that comes in from the outside world and every internal demand that I make upon myself end up fitting in one of these 9 categories.
Want to write a script to automate a task? That goes in 'Create'.
Need to go to the doctor? That is a 'Fitness' task.
Daily journaling habit? That is part of 'Mindset'.
Organizing your house or buying new furniture? 'Lifestyle'.
You would have your own. This might spark you to have your own shift of ideas about how you are organizing your areas of focus. We all have them.
The limited scope gives me freedom. Helps me cut things out and decide what is important or not.
From this solid foundation, goals and habits get formed. In order to create a sense of balance, key metrics get set for measurement, growth, and improvement. It is hard to manage what you don't measure.