There’s still a month before I do my official goals update at the mid-year mark, but I can’t get this idea out my head this week, so here’s a brief post that will act as a precursor to that update. I’ve been doing this focus tracker thing for five months now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t helping in any meaningful way. I’ve also come to the conclusion that it’s wrong to say that I have a focus problem to begin with, it’s really a problem of passions and priorities. Let me try to explain.
First, let’s talk about the problems I’ve been having with the focus tracker I started. Like many other things I’ve tried to do, it was really useful and enlightening for the first couple months. But by March it became obvious that it wasn’t really providing any useful insights into what I was actually doing, aside from seeing if I was reading every day. So I tried to switch it up to assign different projects to different days of the week. That lasted for another couple months until May when I discovered that also wasn’t helping, so I switched it up again to try to do more daily, consistent tasks.
Of course that hasn’t really worked either. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the last decade or so is that I’m not programmed for consistent practice of anything. I keep flipping back and forth between consistent practice (shorter periods of time every day) and batch practice (longer periods of time once a week or so), but I can’t do either one well. Yet I continue to try because every single person who’s ever been successful at anything will tell you that you have to do either one to succeed. And I want to be a successful person as much as anyone else, so I keep pushing myself into failure because neither method seems to work.
That’s why I come up with things like the focus tracker. I convince myself that if I track everything and see trends, it will give me more information on what works and the motivation to keep doing it. But it’s an inherently flawed system because it was never a problem with focusing on things in the first place. I am actually very good at focusing on tasks, and can pound away at something for many hours at a time.
The real problem is that focus only comes from passion. And I’m not passionate about very many things. And those passions very rarely match up with my priorities. Therefore, trying to force myself to focus on priorities that are not passions is doomed to fail.
A couple months ago I wrote a post about my perpetual games, those games that I play for years and keep coming back to whenever I can. Those are perfect examples of activities that I am super passionate about, but are super low priorities. For example, I probably put in 20 or so hours into Heroes of the Storm this week, both in playing it and watching videos about it. I think about that game all the time and I want to play it all the time. But I know in my logical mind that spending all my time on that game doesn’t improve me, as a person, in any meaningful way, it just feels good. The same goes with the thousands of hours I put into playing drums in Rock Band or guitar in Rocksmith. Learning to play music is a worthwhile endeavor, but in the grand scheme of things, the time put in hasn’t really justified the outcome.
The thing that really gets me about this is that I should be okay with it. It’s my free time and I should be happy with whatever I do during that time. And while I’m doing those activities, I am happy. It’s only later, when I see how much of the day has gone by, that I get down on myself for not doing other things that have a more tangible reward. Most days I get to the end of the night and the line from Hamilton plays in my head, “He will never be satisfied.” The big difference between me and Mr. Hamilton is that he had the passion to fulfill his ego, I just have the stupid ego.
So after five months, I have to concede that the focus tracker idea was never going to be the tool that gets me motivated to complete more things. It ended up being yet another tool for me to look at and realize how bad I am at doing things I’m not super passionate about. It was definitely the right tool for determining what my priorities should be, but that doesn’t mean much when missing those priorities has no consequence.
The quest to find the right tool for getting those priorities taken care of continues. What I really need is to get those priorities at the same motivation level as these weekly posts. Outside of using my existing tools to remind myself that it needs to be done, I haven’t had any trouble being motivated to write, as long as I have something to write about. But doing other things like reading, playing non-perpetual games, watching new TV shows or movies, cooking, exercising, each one feels like a hassle. And I like doing all those things, I just don’t love them.
The motivation for writing these posts largely comes from the public nature of them. There are enough people reading them that I feel bad when I miss a week. I also get more motivated to clean the house or cook when people are coming over. But I don’t know if I can rely on that same external pressure to read or play games. I guess I could set myself a review schedule so that I had to finish things in order to write about them, but then it becomes like an actual job. Is that what I really want? Of course not. Is there any other way to motivate myself? Probably not.
Ultimately I don’t want to treat leisure time like homework, but my completionist self tends to make it necessary to be satisfied, if only temporarily. It sucks, but that’s just who I am.