Hey There.Let's talk focus.Short term focus (working for 1h straight without checking social media) is one thing, but long term focus (working on one thing for years) is an entirely different beast.As you may know, I've been trying to constrain my focus to a few projects for about one, one and a half years now. To be honest, I made a lot of progress in terms of long term focus. I said no to many opportunities that were distracting me.Each day I have to say no to things so I can spend time on my two focus projects:
online mini knowledge empire
research career
Both are long term projects, if not even life-long projects (if I don't lose interest in them in the future). Both projects require a lot of very deep uninterrupted thinking that spans over months and years. The idea is simple: Every day, take the next step and try to improve.I love that kind of work. It's less stressful, and it eventually leads to substantial progress. But for things to compound, you need to really stay in the lane. You might be tempted to work on multiple things:
Data analysis of topic Y.
Software development on topic Z.
Experiment design for topic X.
Running a one team business.
All require deep thinking over long periods. The more such stones you have in your schedule, the harder it is to focus on each one of them profoundly.Those are the type of projects where you are the judge, the jury and the executioner. You are a one-man-band. The project gets done if you do the work. If you don't, nothing happens. You're responsible for marketing, finance, customer support, emails, coding, writing, logistics, etc., all of it.But then, the majority of projects in this world require a team. One person can't do it all because the project is simply too large and too complex. If you are just one little team member responsible for one piece of the puzzle, you can still keep the focus mentality. You don't have to have an overview of the whole board. You do the work that it's assigned to you.But if you are the leader of the project or CEO of the company, you need to have an overview of the whole board. You are the strategist, driving force, top decision-maker, .... You are the one that practices overview thinking.If leadership stops pushing in a specific direction, things eventually fall apart. Unless the team is very well established, the top leader determines how fast the project moves forward if the team is new. Overview thinking requires a different mentality than deep topic focus thinking. Doing both simultaneously isn't particularly efficient; it's also really hard to pull both off at the same time.Yet, I took over the leadership of a large volunteer scouting project at the beginning of the year for whatever stupid reason. The whole thing is a pretty big deal because I'm overseeing the crown jewel event (called Taburi) of the 70th anniversary of scouting in Slovenia.If we do things right, we'll be executing a weekend event for around 500 people. Yes, with the COVID-19 still lurking around the corner. Let's not get started on the complexity that this creates. The team of organisers at the moment consists of 6 people. Until the time of the event, the team will grow to around 50 people. I headed bigger teams before, and I'm not even mildly worried about how we will pull the whole thing off. As long I manage to shift to the right mindset, we'll do pretty well. Yes, sure things will go wrong, crisis here crisis there, people will burn out, friendships will be broken, ... But that comes with such high flying projects. Right?What annoys me, though, is that the leadership role is screwing up with my thinking process. The thinking I allocate each day to my focus projects. Leadership brings all sort of stress, decision making that is of execution like nature. We do a, then b, then c, ... Too much of too long term thinking is actually the enemy of progress with such projects. You need to pick the frame, goals, set deadlines and the push, push until it's done.That push part of leadership sucks. It's unemotional, or at least in the way, I do it. (Please let me know if you know of another way.) The push part is a bit robotic, but it gets the job done very well.You have to horse trade with people with different interests, preferences, needs, who knows what else. Unfortunately, you have to play hardball to get things moving in the right direction in the right time frame.So yes, till mid-September, my mind will have to switch to the execution algorithm, which I hate. Still, hey, promises are promises, right? I know what I have to do, but I'll certainly try to figure out how to do overview/execution thinking in parallel to my deep long term thinking. I guess all will be fine if I don't allow people in the meetings to screw up my "emotions" and make me all pissed off. The hack, I might have to start meditating again to keep things in check.I guess mental health will again be of the most significant importance for the next three months. Because to be frank, equations and code never piss me off as much as people doing wired shit in meetings.Three months, then I'm heading back to my thinking cocoon.Ziga
