To Focus or Not to Focus? That Is the Question

by Paul on 6 February 2010

I’m lucky enough to work only about 20 minutes walk from where I live. Friday morning dawned beautifully fine so I decided to walk my 4 1/2 month old puppy Georgie to work with me.

My plan was for a brisk 20 to 25 minute walk (I knew we might have a stop on the way) followed by my normal morning quiet time. Then I would have enough time to read my RSS feeds, and do my GTD weekly review using eProductivity for Lotus Notes to set the day up. I figured I could achieve this easily before I joined the GTD webinar which started at 9 AM New Zealand time.

Not unexpectedly, Georgie didn’t have the same focus in mind. To who walk has nothing to do was getting to the place you want to go to and everything to do with investigating every leaf she could find on the way. It’s not that Georgie’s approach to walks is wrong, it’s just that her purpose is very different to mine.

It occurs to me that in everything we do we need to make sure we know our purpose for doing it. Sometimes we need to focus very carefully making sure we are not side tracked by the many leaves on the path.

But other times we need to intentionally be unfocused. A couple of times I can think of like this are:

Wandering through a nature reserve with the family and darting off to follow something that catches the eye;
During creative discussions; Most of my best ideas flow from way out thoughts that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been blinkered (read “focused”) by the goal;

No doubt you could add many more to this list!

I must thank both David Allen (of GTD fame) and Eric Mack (eProductivity) for giving me the tools that give me the freedom to be intentionally unfocused at the right times.