How do you focus?
Seriously...it's tough...even for us...
Think about your typical day at work. How much time do you spend on Facebook? Instagram? Do you spend afternoons reading articles about hot new startups?
Yes?
Now, how much time do you spend truly engaged in your work?
In today's hyper-connected world, it’s easy to find distraction on a moment by moment basis. It's possible to spend all your days reading about successwithout achieving success for yourself.
With this deluge of information available, it’s easy to get distracted over a much larger timeframe: weeks, months, even years. Without focus on your most important work, it’s all too easy to spend years of your life chasing one shiny object after another, AKA Shiny Object Syndrome.
The allure is simple: we seek the easiest path toward success, without properly defining what success really means to us. This leads many of us to jump from project to project or job to job hoping for that one big win, without spending enough time developing a deep understanding of what really brings success. Sooner or later, we must recognize that constantly jumping from one path to another costs us more than we gain in return.
Focusing for long periods of time on just a few things isn’t easy. If it were, there would be many more experts and successful people in the world. Success requires continually keeping yourself in check when you find your attention straying.
Luckily, we have a technique that will help you maintain focus when it might otherwise have seemed impossible: vertical coherence.
Vertical coherence is the idea that what you’re working on today should support a larger goal that supports a grand, long-term vision for your life. This improves dedication to and satisfaction from your work.
It’s possible to craft a grand, compelling vision for what your life will look like in 10 years and actually achieve it. You just have to ensure that you continue working on the right things. To do this, we help you set up your work life in periods with 90-day goals, each of which supports your larger goals.
In the Progess Planner (or with our worksheets), you can define a 10-year vision that is supported by smaller, 90-day goals. In turn, your 90-day goal is supported by your weekly and daily tasks.
By defining a 10-year vision – a vivid self-visualization that defines where you want to be and what you’re working towards – you can put your goals in context. Think of your 10-year vision as a compass that guides your 90-day goals. This way, each 90-day goal will bring you closer and closer to the you that you’ve always envisioned.
Once you've set up a 10-year vision, you can begin setting 90-day goals.