Day 186: Breaking Through with the 4-Hour Focus Rule

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

Today, the first working day of the year, I put my New Year’s Resolution into action: four hours of focused attention toward my Big Scary Goal.

I think I’m already way ahead.

The Old Business-As-Usual

Without this resolution, I might not have worked on the book much or at all today. I had good excuses:

• I stayed up late celebrating the New Year

• We’re still on break

• Fall semester grades were due

• House guests arrived this afternoon, dear friends from Uganda whom I haven’t seen since pre-COVID (how do kids grow so fast?!?!?!)

Without the resolution, any one of those excuses alone would probably have cut into my typical morning writing time. Without the resolution, all of them together probably would have convinced me to throw in the towel on writing at all today.

But I’m on a mission now. I want to see if the Four-Hour Focus Principle could really work for me this year.

Why Four-Hour Focus?

Why? Is it even healthy or sane to live a goal-oriented life? Why not take each moment as it comes?

As I worked busily all day, I asked myself those questions. They’re good questions, and they don’t answer themselves.

In the end, however, I came up with a couple of pretty compelling answers:

• We don’t choose our Big Scary Goals; they choose us. And the psychic load of not pursuing your Big Scary Goal is harder than the work of pursuing it.

• Committing to Four Hours of Focus every working day, fifty weeks a year, might actually liberate me to take and enjoy my holidays and vacations (instead of living with that I-should-probably-be-working-right-now nag in my head all the time).

How It Worked

With all that in mind, I decided to Just Do It.

I set my four-hour focus block. I blocked out all distractions. I accomplished my most ambitious goal for the day (reviewing newspapers from two months in 1873) and still had a little time for reading a great book about how the rise of corporations changed American culture in the late 19th century.

It was a busy day. But I got it done and still had a lovely afternoon/evening with my visitors. Dinner turned out great, the beds got made up, and the house is now quiet.

A happy new year indeed.