This post is just a few disconnected thoughts I’ve been holding about the topic of focus.

• Focus is a skill. Like other skills, it requires practice. For knowledge work, it’s arguably the most important skill. It’s a foundational ability we can apply towards building products, selling, writing code, or any other job.
• Focus is about serial execution. Adding goals to a plan is easy, whether it’s a daily to-do or a yearly strategy - everything seems possible with the time and resources at our disposal. Then, we don’t specify the order of operations and and try to execute everything in parallel, completing a little bit of everything but also, nothing at all. When you operate with focus, you operate serially - one task at a time. In the end, more gets done. This is deceptively simple.

Focus has been a personal issue for many years, and I’ve found it very difficult to keep focus for long periods of time on just about anything.