The Focus Course

Download Webinar Slides

Understanding the difference between urgent and important, and doing something about it.

“If our life were to be taken over by what is urgent, we would never get to what is truly important.”

Urgent: Something requiring immediate attention.

Important / Essential: Something of great significance or value.

Just because it requires your immediate attention, does not mean it is of great significance or value.

What is urgent is not always important. And what is important is not always urgent.

Urgent is relative; essential is absolute.

Urgency is usually defined by external factors. Essentialness is fundamentally important to a project or goal, regardless of external factors.

It takes time to re-train ourselves that things can be important even when they don’t have a sense of urgency attached to them. If we feel guilty for taking time off work, then so too will we feel guilty working on a project or task that doesn’t have a looming deadline.

1. Decide what’s important.
2. Discover how your time is being spent.
3. Budget your hours.
4. Follow through.

Start with one thing at a time.

For more on this, check out The Focus Course, day 30 where we have the urgency addiction quiz and further training on what urgency addiction is and how to overcome it.

You want to have an addiction to the essential. Where you wage war against work that is based only on urgency and you instead focus all your energy on making sure you are doing only the things that matter.

(This is one reason why I’ve come to love our 8-week work cycles. With limited time, it forces us to focus only on the wildly important.)

How to make natural and consistent progress on your goals

You need your own personal system for getting things done. Habits, routines, etc. that allow you the time and space to do the important work on a regular basis.

What are the current goals you are working toward?

Do you have a time set aside each day or week to work on that goal? Even if it is just 15 minutes — keeping it as part of your weekly routine will maintain your forward momentum.

At the end of each “work slot” you can make a note to yourself for what you want to work on next. Or, you can prepare ahead of time at another time as well.

Having the time set aside (budgeted) and a plan for what the next step is going to be is the most simple way to ensure you keep making consistent progress.

Simple steps for managing and prioritizing your task list(s)

The truth of the matter is that everything requires maintenance.

Your car. Your house. Your yard. Your own body.

The same is true of your task list. It needs to be maintained on a regular basis or it will become stale and out of shape.

A lot of folks don’t like this aspect of it. And that’s understandable. A lot of folks also don’t like to work on their car, nor their yard, nor even their own bodies.

The shape of your finances is a lag measure for the choices you have made regarding your spending and saving habits.

So too is the shape of your day regarding the choices you have made regarding your time, energy, and attention.

So… want to know how to manage your task list?

• You have to look at it every day and update it.
• You have to really DO the things you’ve said you’re going to do.
• You have to be merciless at cutting out the things you are NOT going to do (or have not done in months).
• You need a decision-making framework to help you quickly and easily focus on the things that matter most, and be able to slot them in to your daily schedule so you can actually get them done.

Instead of focusing on or worrying about implementing just the right system before you get goin… start taking action now. Start trying something, fiddle with it, pay attention to how it goes, and adjust.

Q&A

Mike S:

Analog -> Digital: Best practices for migrating (how and what) and then adding metadata for find & use

I open up Things on my iPad in the morning and see what it Due today.

Then I copy anything from Things that is a big item into my planner. These are my MITs.

If there are a handful of smaller items, then I will leave those in Things and slot a time for “Things Admin” in my day to work through the little stuff.

Lastly, whatever gets transferred OUT of things, I cross off so that it only exists in one place. I can do this confidently because I have a regular time to review my notebook tasks, so I know that nothing in my notebook will get forgotten.

---

Justin L:

1) I’ve been doing some formatting and layout work as well as designing covers for my ebook and course. Do you have any recommendation or tips on how to improve design skills for bloggers, writers, and people who are building an audience?

https://designrr.io
Google for awesome ebook designs, or ebook templates, or something (such as on Smashing Magazine), and get some inspiration.

Use a template in Pages and adjust it slightly.

Honestly, the design doesn’t matter that much right now. Solving the right problem and serving your audience is what matters most.

2) I’ve heard that you used Pages before for your ebooks. Can you share your recent tools and workflows for publishing ebooks and getting things into PDF and ePub formats?

I wrote up an article about this a few years ago with a lot of info:

https://shawnblanc.net/2013/08/how-i-self-published-my-book/

Currently I don’t do anything in ePub format. It is a world of hurt and very time consuming. The only ebooks we are shipping are free PDFs or paid PDFs and nobody has been asking us for ePub so it doesn’t seem worth it to us.