Focus - The Key to Productivity and Excellence

Not feeling accomplished? Very busy and yet not happy? No time for anything else? Not sure where you are going? These are but symptoms of lack of focus. Know the meaning of focus well and learn the how to be productive.

Pick up any management or leadership book, you shall find "Focus" as one of the key factors for success.

To many, focus means doing one thing at a time. But this is a very narrow definition since a person, especially the higher level people, can manage multiple projects at the same time. I told people that you can be very focused on multiple things. It is only when you fail to accomplish some things that you know you are loosing focus. Otherwise, you are doing well and very focused.

We have the famous people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates that talk about focus. Here are some of the sayings:

The above map is a subset of The Integrated Success Principles Version 6.

It is good to give a definition of focus.

To me, focus is about concentrating resources on doing the tasks to achieve our goals. 

The components are concentration, resources, tasks/activities and goals. We can loose focus when we fail in any one of the above components. The mind-map below give further details and recommendations:

A recommended book to read is "The Accidental Creative - How to be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice" by Todd Henry which cover FRESH (Focus, Relationship, Energy, Stimuli and Hours), the practices for making you a Creative Person. 

Hope the above clarify the meaning of focus and tell you what to do about focusing to achieve success.

Lim Liat (c) 3 Nov 2011