Juggling, Toggling, and the Myths about Focus

Being a beginner at anything feels about the same: you feel like you don’t master any of the important aspects, you feel like you’re out of your depth, you feel like somebody has the truth, surely not you.

If we have a conversation about the ability, say, to focus, maybe you’re going to say something like “oh, I have difficulty to focus, like everybody else.”

Focusing Like Everybody Else

How do others really do apply this ability to focus? I was talking the other day to my brother-in-law about house repairs. I told him “I’m really not interested these days at patching up my house, I’d rather hire someone and focus on work.” He replied “yeah, I don’t want to do any of that stuff either, I end up not doing it.”

When talking about his investment in Apple, Warren Buffet was raving about Apple’s focus. He said something like “It’s remarkable: all their products can fit on a single table.”

Whether you operate as a busy parent or you’re overseeing the creative process of an entire company, there’s more to focus than romanticizing about how others seem to have so much of it.

Two Skills

The skill to juggle is different than the skill to toggle.

Juggling is a single act of effort. The main tension is in keeping all the balls in the air. Your lack of focus results in all the balls falling. Many people think focus is all about juggling, and juggling all the time. “I’ve lost my focus and so I have to regain it.”

Toggling is where you switch your focus away from one area toward another. From 9 to 5, your focus is on work. After a cool-down period, you can get into your evening focus. Parents have many more toggles to make. 6-8am is breakfast and packing lunches, 6-9pm is focus on homework, supper, chores and putting the kids to bed. Then a bit of “me time”. Lots of switching going on. There’s the workweek’s focus, there’s the weekend’s focus: the two bigger modes on the weekly scale.

In each of these focus times, you hope for a minimum and shoot for a maximum. You better focus!

And then there’s the focus you get when you zoom in, and the focus you get when you zoom out. If your focus on the details is blurry, you’ll get dinged for your lack of quality. If your focus on the big picture is blurry (the strategy questions, the process questions), you get criticized for lacking professionalism, clarity maybe. That’s interesting because strategy might be the area where you’re “juggling”, as if juggling is a sign of doing something temporary, dangerous.

Indeed, if you’re juggling all the time, you’re in a fragile balance.

The Myth of Balance

Is there any way to be balanced while having many things on the go? I believe you can, but you have to let go of the myth of balance.

Let’s imagine you need to fill 20 wine glasses with water. You can toggle between each until all of them are full. Each their turn. To stay in balance, you’re tempted to reduce the number of wine glasses.

Or you could arrange them in a sort of pyramid, and as you fill the top one, you keep pouring. The second row of glasses gets filled by the spillover, and so on. In this case, you see, you’ve achieved balance with little effort: you found out how to arrange your focus to be hierarchical. The top is pointy and singular: zoomed out, it’s clear you know your purpose, your bigger focus. And the base is wide and diverse: your focus is broad but everything is connected.

You’re not juggling in a balancing act. You’re arranging your focus into multiple dimensions.

It turns out that that’s the hack of the busy parent that can do more. It’s also the hack of Apple who can claim an organizational focus on “only a few products”. There’s focus at the top, and focus at the bottom, and the layers are connected.

Don’t be duped by simplistic descriptions about focus. It’s a subject with multiple layers.