{"id":48,"date":"2013-09-17T06:07:45","date_gmt":"2013-09-17T06:07:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/page-clan.com\/hectic-dad\/?p=48"},"modified":"2015-06-12T16:21:55","modified_gmt":"2015-06-12T21:21:55","slug":"f-c-e-c-part-1-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/f-c-e-c-part-1-focus\/","title":{"rendered":"F.C.E.C Part 1 of 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I adopted a four letter acronym as my personal guide in life. It seemed so simple at the time. This little four-letter guy was going to make all my problems go away. I was going to get things done. I was going to keep the house clean. Laundry folder. Broken things would be fixed right away. I would never miss an appointment again.<\/p>\n

It sort of started as a New Year\u2019s resolution type of thing, and now I\u2019m haunted by those four letters almost everyday. Needless to say, it\u2019s been a process.<\/p>\n

F.C.E.C.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A way to live, or to drive myself crazy…in a slow and deliberate manner.<\/p>\n

Rather than spill the beans all at once, today is the first of four posts on F.C.E.C. Why four, you ask? Because there are four letters in the acronym. It was pretty much a no-brainer for me to figure that one out. Like I\u2019ve mentioned before, this really isn\u2019t all that hard, just a bunch of common sense with a lot of words wrapped around it.<\/p>\n

So what is the F-word. No, not that one that gets kids mouths washed out with soap (anybody still do that?). Not the one that gets gasps in polite company.<\/p>\n

F stands for Focus. Plain and simple. Focus. No matter what you\u2019re going, planning on doing, or even wondering about doing, if you don\u2019t focus you won\u2019t go anywhere. I\u2019ve got so many examples it\u2019s not even funny.<\/p>\n

You know those \u201cgoals\u201d that people have (I\u2019m using \u201cpeople\u201d generically, rather than always using the pronoun \u201cI\u201d)? They\u2019re not goals if you don\u2019t write them down or at least put them in a form you can refer to. They\u2019re not going to happen if you don\u2019t focus on them.<\/p>\n

For me, I say I want to get healthier, lose weight, and get toned. But if I don\u2019t focus on those things, I end up sitting down in my comfy office chair and writing blog posts about all sorts of other things.<\/p>\n

Focus<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

When you look it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the kind of focus I\u2019m talking about \u201cdirected attention\u201d is the seventh definition. The other six are fine, and make great metaphors for the kind of focus I\u2019m talking about, but \u201cdirected attention\u201d is what I want to concentrate on.<\/p>\n

I touched on the subject in post 9, Be where you are<\/a>. But concentrating on the thing you are doing is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to true focus. You have to have a single-minded concentration on the project, task, or whatever that you\u2019re working on. If it\u2019s planning a project, you need to really get into it. Immerse yourself in it. Try to dispel the distractions. This is even more important when you are actually doing the task. You\u2019ve got to get into the task wholeheartedly.<\/p>\n

I used to love to tell people that I was the best multi-tasker out there. I could handle inputs and requests from all the kids, my wife, my customers, my parents and everybody else simultaneously. People would ask \u201cHow do you do it\u201d and I would smugly answer \u201cMultitasking\u201d.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m older now. Some days I\u2019m even wiser. And I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that we really don\u2019t multi-task. What we really do is switch from one task to another, really, really quickly. But there is a price to be paid when we do that switching. Your brain has to stop the focus on one task, store away something about it so you can pick it back up later, and then jump to the new task. When we \u201cmulti-task\u201d we simply go through that process, jumping back and forth between tasks. If you\u2019re fast as switching tasks, you look like you\u2019re doing multiple things at once. But I contend that you\u2019re not. You\u2019re just really good at switching tasks.<\/p>\n

Over time, I\u2019ve decided that I\u2019m great at what appears to be \u201cmulti-tasking\u201d, but it comes at a very high price. The biggest part of the cost comes from quality of work. While I\u2019m good at \u201cmulti-tasking\u201d, that doesn\u2019t mean that I\u2019m exempt from having to do the stop, store, switch cycle. So I clutter up my brain with all these stored states so I can pick up that stopped task later on.<\/p>\n

But a couple years ago I came up with F.C.E.C. and started to focus more on what I\u2019m doing at the moment. This led me to a discovery that I could complete tasks faster when I applied focus. The other three parts of the acronym help, but you\u2019ll have to wait to read about them.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s important here is that focus is essential, and must be the first step in getting things done. Dispensing with distractions and filling your consciousness with the thing at hand works so well for me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not perfect at it. When the kids are all home for the holidays we have twenty or more conversations going on, and I jump from one to the other just like I always have. But I\u2019ve also taken to sitting down, one-on-one with many of the kids to really go deeper and find out what\u2019s going on in their lives.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s a payoff that, frankly, cannot be measured. When you focus on a person or a task the quality of the end result is so much better.<\/p>\n

Try it out. Focus, and see what impact is has for you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I adopted a four letter acronym as my personal guide in life. It seemed so simple at the time. This little four-letter guy was going to make all my problems go away. I was going to get things done. I was going to keep the house clean. Laundry folder. Broken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[22,27,38],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity","tag-creativity","tag-f-c-e-c","tag-gtd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nF.C.E.C Part 1 of 4 -<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hectic-dad.com\/hectic-dad\/f-c-e-c-part-1-focus\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"F.C.E.C Part 1 of 4 -\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A couple of years ago, I adopted a four letter acronym as my personal guide in life. 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