The Focus Course

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As you all know from the Focus Course, we have 6 areas of our life: Inner Personal, Relationships, Vocation, Finances, Rest, and Physical.

Every area of your life overlaps with the other areas. What you do at work affects your finances. The state of your finances can affect your relationships. The state of your physical health can impact the state of your inner personal health. They are all interrelated.

But in different seasons different ones are more dominant. And so the question often becomes: How to get it ALL done?

The answer is in habits and routines.

If you recall from the Focus Course, that is what Lifestyle Practice are for. They help you stay on track and healthy in certain areas of your life when they aren’t your primary focus.

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits, and their habits decide their futures.” — FM Alexander

The habits and routines you put in place for the different areas of your life will determine the future of that area.

• Your financial habits determine your financial future.
• Your relational habits determine your relational future — think about your patterns of behavior and routines with your kids, your spouse, your co-workers.
• Your physical habits determine your future physical health.
• Your inner personal habits will determine the future state of your emotions and inner personal life.
• Your vocational habits will determine the future of your career.
• And your rest habits… I can’t think of an area of life that has more impact on all the others. Your rest habits really do determine the future health, energy, and longevity of every other area of your life.

Here are a few examples of my own…

Finances: Cash Envelopes and Automated Giving, Saving, Investing

Been doing these since 2012. One of the single greatest contributors to us living within our means and keeping healthy finances.

There’s more to it than this. We also have some other routines that we do: such as automatically taking money off the top for giving and investing — money that never even hits our bank account.

Relationships: Date Night and Family Day

This guarantees a regular touchpoint every single week with the people that matter most.

Vocation: Write Every Day

This habit helps ensure I am doing critical work every day, and that I’m not floundering. I also leave a note out for myself to make sure I am focusing on the most important task / topic every day.

Inner Personal: Celebrating Small Wins

This keeps my momentum and motivation high. It helps me to recognize the progress I am making in different areas of life.

Physical Health: Yoga and Running

I have a simple workout routine that I can easily do every day without thinking about it.

Rest: Reading & Working with Hands

I want to make sure that my rest time leaves me actually feeling rested and recharged.

As much as I love to binge on Netflix, I don’t often feel energized or excited after watching a few shows in a row. That’s why I keep my Netflix time to a maximum.

Don’t Neglect The Areas of Your Life

Another reason having these habits is so important is that, for many of these areas of our life, they can easily get neglected because they don’t seem important right now.

For the areas of our life that don’t carry any “urgency” it can be difficult to give them the time and attention they deserve. And thus, often times we wait until we hit a crisis before addressing the issue.

Some examples of hitting a wall before we take an area of life seriously:

• Inner Personal: Crisis of faith; stress; anxiety; burn out.
• Relationships: relational strain; broken relationships; etc.
• Finances: debt; lack of savings investing; paycheck to paycheck.
• Physical: sickness; life-impacting poor health.
• Vocation: This one seems to dominate. Usually not a lot of trouble giving it our attention.
• Rest: Feeling exhausted; not motivated; not creative; not recharged.

Don’t wait until you hit a crisis to begin focusing on an area of your life.

If your life is taken over by what is urgent, you will never get to what is truly important.

EVERY AREA of your life is important.

To neglect one area is to, in part, neglect the others as well. For example: If you care about your family, then you should also care about your own physical health so you can be around to see your kids grow up.

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Now, let’s focus on the are of Rest and Fun.

While this can be an area that is neglected: many people do not giving themselves the rest they need in terms of sleep but also in terms of play.

But even worse: Often our rest time is squandered. When we do take time to rest, we do it all wrong.

Additionally, many folks who suffer from workaholism have a fear of boredom and and a fear of laziness. Their addiction to the urgent keeps them constantly working and doing.

It Matters How you Rest

There are ways to rest and have fun that leave you feeling energized. That lead to physical, mental, emotional, and relational health. And there are ways to rest that leave you feeling drained and comatose.

What Leaves you Feeling Rested and Recharged?

There are ways to rest and have fun that leave you feeling energized. Think about what those things are for you?

For me:

• Working with my hands on a project I enjoy.
• Good conversations with close friends, family.
• Reading a good book or listening to a podcast.
• Journaling

But here’s the problem…

I never WANT to do these things in the moment. I want to just veg out on the couch and watch endless Netflix…

Activation Energy is a Jerk

If you know that reading will leave you feeling more rested, more recharged, and have more energy… but you WANT to watch Netflix instead… How do you reconcile that?

You build better defaults.

During your normal day, what are your free hours? What is your morning routine? What is your evening routine? Do you plan how you want to spend your free time? Do you plan how to spend your weekend?

When you have routines and plans in place, it can help ensure that you spend your downtime and free time wisely. So that you don’t squander it.

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Some additional tips to help you rest well:

The 5-Minute Rule

Commit to working on a project or reading or writing for just 5 minutes. Set a time. And work for 5 minutes without interruption. Then, if you’re not feeling it, move on to something else.

It’s far easier to commit for 5 minutes than to commit for an hour. And, often times, once we’ve gotten started, we have some momentum behind us and we want to continue on.

Rest with your hands

If you work with your head, rest with your hands. Since I spend the bulk of my day reading, writing, thinking, typing, etc. I try to spend my down time doing a physical project. I love working in the garage doing woodworking or wrenching on my Jeep.

Take a Cheat Day

Give yourself a cheat day: a time in the week where you can binge watch your favorite show or scroll through your Facebook timeline for as long as you want, etc.

Raise the Activation Energy for things you DON’T want to do

What are the things that “drain” you? Or that you don’t want to do? How can you make it more difficult to do those things?

For example: if it’s social media: delete the social media apps from your phone; if it’s TV then hide the remote.

Lower the Activation Energy for things you DO want to do

This is exactly what a morning and evening routine does. Have your book out, or have your plan for what project your going to work on. Or commit to doing that thing for just 5 minutes.