Squiggly sprint 24: Day 11 - Focus

Day 11 of the SquigglySprint, we are over halfway, and the topic is Focus

As is often the case, it was fun hearing Sarah and Helen discuss their polar opposite approaches to a topic! Their strategies to maintain focus were based on visualization and deadlines.

Mine is quite different, in that I tend to have my brain bounce around topics, which is very distracting. But once I get something out of my brain and into a system, it doesn’t pop back into my head. I have a wide range of systems for this:

The first, and easiest is to write things down. I have notebooks (yes, plural), and oneNote, but I also use a Get Things Done tool called Nirvana. This is on my phone & laptop, and quick ideas about what I need to do in the future get dropped in the ToDo list on this very quickly.

In work, we develop software for Confluence and Jira, so I naturally have a whole range of dashboards, projects, and filters set up to skim through at various parts of the day. Most importantly, I have loads of automations in place to ensure that things are caught before they go wrong. Only today I was working with my team on a Jira Board based on the Get Things Done framework that is already automatically adding regular tasks.

The final, quite recent addition, is Superhuman for mail. This is an AI powered client, which has been a lifesaver in terms of getting to the mythical inbox zero. Even the simplest thing like looking at a mail and being able to easily file it away to come back to me next week.

So for me, my day is broadly “Clear my GTD list, clear my JIRA filters, clear my mail”, and then the rest of the day can be used for focus work and meetings.

For me, the podcast today was very much about how to push through the todo list to ensure you complete what you need to complete. For me, it’s the other way round. Clear the lines, which is an essential mantra of mine in customer support work, and then you can work for the rest of the day with less distraction and more focus.