What’s The Difference Between An Area of Focus And A Routine?
This week, what is the difference between an area of focus and a routine? It’s a question I am frequently asked, so this week I’m answering that one.
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Script
Episode 134
Hello and welcome to episode 134 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I am answering a frequently asked question about areas of focus and routines. What are the differences? It’s a question I am often asked and it is a difficult question to answer because we will all have different priorities and different things that are important to us. If you are just starting out building a new business your areas of focus will be very different from a student managing their PhD thesis or a person just starting out on their career in architecture.
That said, understanding which tasks need to be performed frequently and consistently in order for a goal or project to be successfully completed, that is relatively easy. It’s a skill well worth developing as it will help you to focus on what’s important.
Now, before we get to the question, if you have joined the Time Sector Course, check out the additional lessons I have added. I have added a lesson on managing your actionable email and developing a project in Microsoft OneNote. OneNote is a great app to develop your projects as you have a lot of features that can help. I will add an Evernote one once the promised Evernote update is released and in the coming weeks, I will be adding a Google setup for those of you who have asked for it.
Also, a Time Sector System for teams course is in development that can be rolled out within a company. I’m excited about that as I believe this system in a team will simplify the way projects and work are managed within a team.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Carlo. Carlo asks: Hi Carl, thank you for your excellent Time Sector Course. it has changed the way I manage my tasks in such a positive way. Yesterday, my weekly review only took 25 minutes—it used to take me nearly an hour every week. My question is: you talk about “recurring areas of focus” and “routines”. I don’t completely understand the difference between the two. Could you explain a bit more?
Thank you, Carlo, for this question. I am regularly asked it and I know it can be a difficult one because there is a grey area between the two.
The simple answer is routines do not improve your life or take your projects and goals forward. They are just things you have to do. Take the garbage out, wash the car, dog, cat etc. Do your expenses, check your bank accounts or update your time card. It would not be the end of the world if you missed doing a routine for a few days. They are just life’s less important necessities that we all have to do.
Areas of focus are the opposite of routines. Areas of focus do contribute to your goals and projects and do help to improve your life.
Doing your exercise, writing your journal, spending time talking with your partner, your kids and your friends. All these could be part of your areas of focus. Any activity you do that moves a project or goal forward would be classed as an area of focus.
Anything that is important to you and your wellbeing can be classed as an area of focus. This is why it is hard for me to give a precise definition. We all have different goals. Interests and priorities. Only you can decide what these are, nobody else can. I am afraid if I give a list of what can be classed as an area of focus people will copy it and think only things on that list can be an area of focus.
That is not the case. Areas of focus are deeply personal. They are whatever you decide is important, not me.
In a way you can think of an area of focus as any task you want to focus on that enhances your life or moves a goal or project forward.
So why separate them? Well,
One of the difficulties many of us have is we confuse activity with progress. We do a lot of tasks and feel like we have been busy but if we stop and analyse what we have done we have not moved any project or goal forward. We have been like the proverbial hamster running around on a hamster wheel. We are moving, but we are going nowhere.
This was a problem I identified in myself a long time ago. I felt busy all the time, I was doing a lot of stuff, running around and feeling stressed but my projects and goals were hardly moving anywhere. It was only when I stopped and analysed what I was doing each day did I discover that 80% of what I was doing was not important. It would not have been a big issue had I not done those tasks. It certainly would have made no difference whether a project completed on time or not. Yet, I felt these tasks had to be done.
This was something I learned from Tony Robbins’ Time of Your Life course, we micromanage tasks too much. We break things down too small.
There’s a false belief that if you break down tasks to a ‘more manageable’ level it will make the project easier or make it easier to start the project and stop you from procrastinating. It’s complete rubbish of course. If you are going to procrastinate you are going to procrastinate.
Just because you have a task that says “open up PowerPoint” instead of “work on presentation” it’s going to make it easier is rubbish. Being explicit and clear about what you need to do - ‘work on your presentation’ - is still going to get done.
However, one thing is important, you do need to identify the difference between the tasks that are going to give you the biggest return and the ones that give you a false sense of making progress.
This is why being very clear about the tasks that will move you towards your goals and the tasks that won’t move the needle very much is important and why I recommend you make a distinction between tasks that drive goals and projects forward and tasks that won't.
Why recurring areas of focus?
If you want to complete a project or achieve a goal you are going to have to take action consistently over a period of time. You won’t learn Spanish if all you do is study for an hour once a month. If you want to learn Spanish or any other foreign language you will have study the language almost every day consistently.
Learning a foreign language is not hard in terms of the process. The process is very easy. The difficulty is maintaining the consistency. That’s why so many people fail at achieving their goals and why projects are delayed. It’s a lack of consistency. Doing the work, day after day.
Establishing what tasks you need to do frequently and consistently that drive you forward is essential. Not knowing which tasks give you 80% of your results and which ones do not is going to lead you down roads that either take you nowhere or take you on a detour away from the objective.
Once you have established what these tasks are, you can then set them up to recur when you need them to recur. For me, exercise and fitness is an important part of my life. Maintaining my weight at 80 kgs is a part of that. So, I have a recurring area of focus that tells me to schedule my exercise on my calendar every Sunday.
However, taking my weight every Friday is actually set up as a routine. If I skip taking my weight reading once or twice it will not have any serious impact on my overall goal. Doing my exercise does have an impact. For me, if I am not exercising, I gain weight. If I exercise my weight remains reasonably consistent. Not exercising also impacts my energy levels too. So, an 80% impact task is doing exercise. Knowing my current wright is a 20% impact task.
Likewise, with my content. I produce seven pieces of content each week. One blog post, one podcast episode, three YouTube videos and two newsletters. Each one of those requires planning and writing or recording. These are important areas of focus for me and they have to be done every week. They are therefore contained in my recurring areas of focus.
Updating my content scheduler—I use Asana to manage my content—is not essential to the production of my content. It is important, but not essential. So, updating my Asana boards is a routine. I have it come up on a daily basis as part of my daily routines, but it would not have an effect on my content production if I skipped a day or two.
The important work is content creation. Managing the content schedule is not going to help with creating the content.
So there you go, Carlo, hopefully, that has given a clearer picture of the difference between a routine and an area of focus.
The whole point in separating these is so you can differentiate between the tasks that will drive your projects and goals forward and the tasks that do not really contribute towards that goal. Routines can be important but remember they do not make a big impact.
Over time you will get better at this and will instinctively know what tasks need to be performed regularly that will lead to your project or goal’s success and the less important tasks that, while perhaps being important, are not going to move things forward very much.
Thank you for your question and thank you to everyone who has joined the Time Sector Course. The feedback has been tremendous and I am so grateful to have been able to help so many people.
Thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.