The Focus Course
The Power of a Focused Life is a guided, online course about doing your best creative work without sacrificing a healthy work/life balance to get it.
If you’d like to be notified the moment The Power of a Focused Life comes out, please sign up for my email newsletter, The Fight Spot.
You’ll get my weekly emails about creativity, focus, and risk. You’ll be notified as soon as the book and course come out. And you’ll get a free PDF guide, The Procrastinator’s Guide to Progress, right now. Awesome!
Living Without Regret in the Age of Distraction
Do you know what your goals and values are for each day? Do you have a plumb line to see if the tasks you’re doing fit into the big picture of what’s important to you? Are you afraid you might be wasting your time on tasks that don’t matter? Do you have an addiction to your inbox and your social streams?
Making the time to do our best creative work goes far beyond white-knuckle focus or ripping our internet cable out of the wall.
We live in a day and age where we never have to be bored. We have the internet in our pocket. Just think about how critical is it to have some sort of idea for where we want to be headed with our life lest the tide of our social networks and overflowing inboxes get the best of us. It is up to us to be proactive about how we spend our time and to what we give our focus.
“If I have to memorize one more life hack that will make me 8x more productive in just 3 seconds per day, I’m going to scream”
You know (or at least know of) all the tips, tricks, systems, hacks, and methods. But are they working for you? Are you just doing productive? Do you feel like your day mostly spent taking care of the urgent tasks and putting out fires? Are you always reacting to the incoming, never making progress on meaningful projects? Does your job ever allow you differentiate between what’s urgent and what’s important? Are you doing your most important work? Are you making meaningful progress on that work every single day?
So many of us view “productivity” as something that only people in suits care about. Those guys over there want efficiency, systems, methodologies, and rote memorization of best practices while the rest of us just want to be left alone.
But meaningful productivity is for everyone. Including you. It’s for the farmer, the artist, the CEO, the housewife, the creative director, et al. Because meaningful productivity is not about systems, it’s about having a bias toward action that flows from clarity of our values and vision. Meaningful productivity is the overflow of purpose and priorities.
Unfortunately, productivity tends to be defined by how well we use our task management systems, how organized our calendar app is, how fast we can blaze through a pile of emails, and how fluidly we flow from one meeting to the next. But those metrics so often reward effective busywork and give little dignity to meaningful work.
Is the stay-at-home dad who spends most of his day changing diapers and cleaning up messes any less productive than his wife who is the CEO of a charity organization?
What if we started defining productivity differently? Skin-deep productivity cares only about our party tricks of balancing many plates at once.
Meaningful productivity cares about consistently giving our time and attention to the things which are most important.
We want to spend our time on meaningful work — work that matters
For more than a decade, I have been teaching and learning about diligence and focus. I’ve spoken about these topics at conferences, taught them to my design team during my time as a creative director, and now that I work from home running a small network of websites, I continue to implement them in my own life every day.
Something I’ve discovered is that it’s important to people that are able to give their time and energy to the things which are meaningful. They want a lifestyle that is conducive to doing their best creative work without sacrificing a healthy work/life balance to get it.
Normally I do pretty well in the swirl of creative tension around work, but this stop-one-start-another moment has been a challenge for reasons I can’t identify. [This week’s newsletter] was exactly the reminder I needed. You’re helping people and changing lives.
— Keith
A guided, online course (and a book)
The overarching goal of both the book and The Focus Course is twofold:
- committing to honesty and clarity with a bias toward action; and
- being able to thrive in the midst of tension.
We discuss the foundational components of a focused life as well as the granular, practical, and actionable elements of diligence, focus, work/life balance, and creating meaningful work.
The Focus Course expounds on al of this through a five modules: Foundations, Honesty, Clarity, Action, and Meaning. Thus, walking you through the components of a focused life (vision, goals, action plans, daily habits, schedule) and helping you apply change; helping you find areas in your life you can simplify in order to make space for focus, motivation, and clarity; and helping you build up the motivation, clarity, and integrity needed to create meaningful work.
The course itself consists of 40 guided, daily questions and tasks for the sake of helping you pace yourself through The Power of a Focused Life. And it gives you the why behind everything you do, so not only are you actually implementing the change, you’re also learning the reasons.
In the Focus Course we’ll seek to re-define what we think of when we say “productivity” and “meaningful work”. We’ll build momentum in your personal integrity, learn to establish habits that stick, help bring a healthy understanding of what work/life balance means, learn about your own lifestyle and the way you work and what your values are, and more.
The Focus Course is about more than just head knowledge — it’s an introduction to experiential knowledge.
I have read my share of productivity books, blogs, hacks but nothing I have read comes close to your work in terms of helpfulness, depth and significance.
— Tracy
What others are saying so far
Right now, The Power of a Focused Life is still being finalized. The Focus Course is currently in private pilot with 88 students from around the world. Here’s what some of them have to say about the course so far:
The Course is perfect and really does what it promises: it helps you focus. It’s the perfect kind of words and the structure is great.
— Florian T.
Love it! Thanks Shawn! I look forward to reading your posts each day. It’s such a better way to spend my breaks and ride home than checking social media!
— Elana S.
I was baffled by the simplicity. I genuinely love the fact that you make it easy for us, that you start really slowly, with a really simple thing. You stated it clearly: we’re not going to change our entire life. But, bits by bits, we CAN change.
— Pierre
I just want to say that the Focus Course has been fantastic so far. It’s clear that you’ve put a ton of time and effort into researching and writing these emails.
— Brian H.
Let me just say BRAVO! I’m loving this course — your content is simple yet profoundly powerful.
— Havilah C.
Coming in the Summer of 2015
If you’d like to be notified the moment The Focus Course comes out, then please sign up for my email newsletter, The Fight Spot.
You’ll get my weekly emails about creativity, focus, and risk. You’ll be notified as soon as the book and course come out. And I’ll send you my free PDF guide, The Procrastinator’s Guide to Progress, right now. Awesome!
I’m typically one who will skim an email and archive it, but this is one I’ve already read multiple times and it’s still in my inbox. It’s likely going to end up as a pinned note in Evernote so I can refer back to it often. This is exactly the kind of thing I strive to consider and focus on… this is the perfect reminder to keep focused on the essential. I’m really enjoying this focus on fulfillment and am really looking forward to the new book.
— Ryan
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About the author
Shawn Blanc lives in Kansas City with his wife Anna, and their two sons, Noah and Giovanni. He is a creative-director-turned-full-time-writer who works from home publishing his humble network of tech- and design-centric websites. His book and interview series, Delight is in the Details, is for people who make things.