If you are like me, you have heard this many times — you need to focus — but what does it mean? Am I not focused? I'm spending an exorbitant amount of time in front of my computer every day working on things that I find interesting; what’s more than that?
Generally, when people tell you to focus, they mean that you should work on just one thing because that ought to be your obsession, and the thing you spend all the time on.
They generally don’t recommend that you work on 10 different things in parallel, while also trying to read, hike, spend time with family, exercise, eat health …etc etc etc.
Is that a good advice? yes or no.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and the way I've come to understand focus is this.
Focus is the ability to assign resources to projects in a way that improves the odds of a positive outcome.
Take Elon Musk, for example. Do you think he is not focused? He's working on multiple companies at the same time, and all companies are doing pretty well. Same goes for Jack Dorsey a few years ago, he was working multiple companies, and the companies did well. By that accord you can multitask just fine and you don't need to focus as long as you get shit done.
The key is that these guys didn’t do it alone; they had sufficient resources to hire teams that did the work. They raised the money and the pushed the boundaries, but really, they just managed resources better than anyone else.
Most people giving you advice to only work on one thing, simply assume linear distribution of resources and they assume that you only have enough time and energy and mental capacity to do just one thing. That may be true. However, that does not have to be true. You can make it not true.
The reality is that most things don't demand 12-18 hours of consistent effort per day, so if you are able to effectively context switch between five different tasks in that time spam, and you can provide the maximum output on those five things, then you absolutely can and should multitask.
Most people are gonna spend eight hours a day doing one thing poorly and you have an option to do five things well; do that and don't listen to anybody's advice on what it means to focus because only you know what that means, and how far you can push it.
Most people don’t run on jet fuel, you might.
You do you.
-Kirill.
