People who work with me for very long tend to begin to refer to me as a “Jack of All Trades” (which I’ll now refer to as JoAT in the remainder of this article). I have always been someone that takes everything on that comes my way and does a decent job at it. My job title has never been something that encapsulates even a small amount of what I do. In relationships, I tend to have many strong acquaintances rather than a few extremely strong friendships. This lack of focus on any specific aspect of any part of my life has served me well, and plays well to strengths of mine such as connecting things and ideas, looking to the future, strategizing, and growing social circles.

I have noticed life beginning to nudge me in another direction lately. Not to move completely away from my JoAT style, but to rebalance and refocus. The balance point is difficult to pinpoint for me. On one side of it, I’m too focused on too few things, and some things I’m responsible fall through the cracks. That can be remedied either by reducing the level of focus on what I am paying attention to, or by removing some of the things I’ve taken ownership of without necessarily having need to. The other side of the balance is where I feel I am now, spread so thin that I can’t afford to focus on anything too much because there’s too much that needs my attention. In fact, there is so much demanding my attention right now, it’s nearly impossible to focus on anything but the essentials for very long at all. (Look at how long it has been since my last blog post here, for example.)

Brad Bollenbach recently wrote about keeping things simple. Provided within that writing is the following list of questions, which I have decided is a good starting point for figuring out how to find my focal balance again.

  • What’s my goal?
  • How will I know when I’ve achieved it?
  • How am I measuring my progress?
  • How well is my current approach working?

A clear example of something I can apply these questions to is the work I’ve been doing on my book. My goal is to write a book anyone can use to figure out what their passions are in life, how to spend more time doing things that strengthen the things they are passionate about, and why you’d want to spend more time doing that. (That’s probably too long of a mission statement, but it’s where I am right now). I’ll know I’ve achieved it when the final manuscript is sitting in my hands and the hands of my publisher. So far so good. But… I’m really not measuring my progress. I don’t even have a loose, qualitative way to express my progress on it. So that’s a huge question mark, and something easily indicative of a lack of focus on the project. My current approach is so-so. I’m collecting lots of information, and the concept is getting more and more refined, but I need to get a lot more organized about the project.

I’m going to work through this more over the weekend and report back in a blog post update.