Jumping in and out of multiple topics, roles and events like a camera lens zooming in and out — while thinking "I'm focused on this right now" for ten seconds or ten minutes — isn't focus.
Neither is whittling away hours at the foot of a guru, being idle. More on that below.
SMART focus
Stillness
There's a word that means lots of things to different people. You might think "rest" or "peaceful." You might think "solitude" and either panic or immediately wish for an opportunity to get away from it all. It's all of these things, and more.
There's an art to being still. It's not "hold still" as in the opposite of squirming — the tug of war between a parent and a child. It's not "hold still" as in stopping at a red light until the required time passes. It's not "wait here."
Standing still while fully revved and spinning our wheels inside isn't being still. It's being stuck against our will. We're captives, hostages, detoured, knocked off course.
Stillness in this sense is completely different. It's stillness of soul. And it's a choice — it's intentional. It's meaningfully superseding busyness. It's replacing the measuring stick of multitasking with the yardstick of focus. The goal here isn't to find what's easy, it's to find what's helpful.
Uncluttered
Focus means exchanging the role of mental handyman — a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, surface-level generalist mentality — for an uncluttered approach that's content with fewer topics and unconcerned with comparisons.
Smart focus is uncluttered, organized, or at least prioritized without guilt.
Alert
In the stillness and uncluttered mode described above, we become alert to opportunities, new thoughts, expanded perspectives.
This is the benefit of being focused: we begin to experience a compounding effect, a deepening result — as opposed to a growing collection of mental stuff and disjointed experiences.
Regulated
Not regimented. Not relegated. Those are three different words. Regimented means over-controlled. Relegated means pushing things off into the future or keeping them in the past.
Regulate means "controlling the speed of," or "adjusting to an external standard." Which prompts us to be selective about the external standards we adjust to. And notice that it's the control that's the focus, not the speed. Think ballroom dancing, not a 100-meter dash.
Regulated means you can speed up, go full force, then equally scale back and idle for a while. You're regulating your activity, not reacting to the trivial, the fleeting, or the seemingly urgent.
Trusting
Living with smart focus requires trust. Trusting the people around you to provide some of what you need, because you're exchanging the frantic attempt to take care of every aspect of life for a basic trust — in those around you, in God, in a future that doesn't require you to control every detail in a self-survival kind of way.
(There's a separate post on Smart Solitude.)
DUMB ways to lose your focus
Detached
The positive ability to disengage from performance and unending expectations is not the same as being detached.
Not if your version of detached looks like becoming disconnected from people, unaffected by others' needs, or frankly irresponsible. Let's stop short of embracing idleness in place of stillness. You don't need to be physically inert in order to be internally still.
Urgent
Ever notice that most everything we label urgent has to do with someone, something, or somewhere else?
Of course there are true emergencies where you offer help and support to someone. But the vast majority of the time, it's more likely we're living in reaction to "urgent" in a much more superficial way.
Marching
Marching along to someone else's drumbeat is in vogue these days. It's understandable to a point — a group provides identity, safety, a place to belong, at least externally.
But have you considered who the drummer is? Do you know where the group is going? And why?
Smart focus is marching to your own beat internally, then finding a group of others in sync with that beat as a bonus. Marching with a group is not a requirement, not a survival skill, and not your identity.
Believing everyone's opinion
Everyone can't be right about everything all the time. It's simply not possible. And it's not unkind to disagree.
You can love a person, and be loved as a person, while having your own perspective and opinion. Anyone forcing you to believe an idea, without the option for you to choose, isn't loving you — they're using you for their own ends.