つ━☆ﾟNº166 Focus is no hocus-pocus 🔮🧙

This month will mark 3 years of Revue newsletters! Feels like quite a milestone and certainly gratifying to get these shipped (nearly) weekly. That requires focus. But so does every aspect of my job. And most peoples jobs really.

I feel that often I hear people talk about productivity, hacks etc but my impression is that focus isn’t really a buzzword, so this article caught my attention:

Do you want a single takeaway from the 21st century so far? Here it is: To the focused go the spoils.

Have I already lost your attention? No wonder. You’re being pulled in a bunch of directions at high speed.

The basic premise that NY times journalist, Matt Richtel makes in this 7min read is that focus is essentially binary.

It’s there or it isn’t. And, importantly, it can’t be divided. To this, I’d add a nuance: Attention and focus are not exactly the same thing.

“Sustained attention” is the holy grail and ridding yourself of external distraction may seem obvious but then you have to rid yourself of internal distraction too… To understand how to do that he has some insight & advice:

👀 Your eyeballs are for sale. To everyone who isn’t you, your focus is a commodity. It is being amassed, collected, repackaged and sold en masse. Collectively, audiences are worth more and more everyday. But individually, your focus doesn’t have any worth the eyeball aggregators. To you, though, it is everything.