It’s so hard to get the right focus in life and in career. We are in a frenzied world that is too-often interrupted by shifting priorities, social media notifications, and unexpected things. Of course, that is all on top of our natural tendency to lose motivation (get lazy or complacent) and have occasional breakdowns in health. If only there was a solution. And though it’s not the be-all cure-all, Michael Hyatt’s book, Freedom to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More By Doing Less, provides a much needed supplement: a definable and easy to personally adapt system.
I was invited to be on Michael’s launch team for this book, which means I got to read an advance copy and interact with some other members of the launch team. Yes, we’re asked to review and help promote it, but just as the case with all the books I review, you’re getting my honest reflections.
Get the Right Focus – it’s “so simple” – or is it?
In college, my fraternity brothers and I had a frequent saying: stop, think, go like hell. I came to mind often as I read about Hyatt’s three steps to help obtain a right focus. Those three steps: STOP, CUT, and ACT are each broken down into three sub-steps of their own. The overall ambition is to help you prioritize, create efficiencies and then take action.
It sounds simple. Duh. Am I right? Make your priorities, be efficient and act. Yeah, it’s simple. That is, until you actually try to do it. And then you suddenly realize, you need help.
And that’s where Freedom to Focus comes in.
Freedom to Get the Right Focus
Within each step and sub-step of Hyatt’s book, readers are provided with many easy to apply techniques, examples, and practical tools. The first step (stop) introduces a the premise that “productivity should free you to pursue what’s most important to you.”
If you are like me, you take on a lot of things and wear many hats. You have trouble saying no. As a result, you have inadvertently said no to things simply by saying yes to too much. And then you are left to lament about not having enough time, money or motivation (or any of the three) for the things you really want to do.
This is where Hyatt offers a means for helping you define what it is that amp up your passion, and those things that zap your passion.
Designing Your Life for Focus
Your plan can’t be to allow everyone else to steer your day or you’ll never get anything done that matters to you. Design a day that works for your goals and priorities.
Michael Hyatt: Free to Focus
Hyatt treats readers to a lot of premises, approaches, and tech tools to help them achieve their right focus. Nowhere in the book does he say you need to eliminate every possible distraction, spend a ton of money, and achieve a utopian state of Zen. Instead, you gain a simple formula with a ton of potential.
Will you be able to adapt it all into your life? Probably not. Truthfully, some if will not work for you and the way you go about life. That’s okay, though. And that is the beauty of it. There are several suggestions you can experiment with to see if they do or don’t work. From there, you can take ideas and iterate on them of find ways to work concepts into other parts of your life.
I have personally done that and it’s allowed me to achieve more focus. Am I there yet? Absolutely not. But I’m still experimenting and I am sure that, by this time next month and next year, I will be closer to having the right focus in my life than I was or am right now.