Half Your Life Is Over—Now What?

How important is it to develop your Areas of Focus? That’s the question I am answering this week. 

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Script | 371

Hello, and welcome to episode 371 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

Why spend time working on your areas of focus when there’s already a ton of stuff to do and not enough time to do it?

While very few people ever overtly ask that question, I recall asking myself that question when I was starting out on my productivity and time management journey in my twenties. It seemed such a waste of time when I had people to call, work to do and a multitude of other commitments waiting for me to deal with. 

The trouble was that while I was running around dealing with all the so-called urgent things, I was neglecting what was genuinely important to me. You know things like spending time with my family, reading books, and knowing what I wanted to do with my career. Those things felt like a luxury I just didn’t have time for. 

But what was I really doing? I was prioritising the unimportant over the important because I was addicted to being busy. And that’s not healthy. 

It destroys relationships, damages your health (mentally and physically) and just leaves you feeling empty and exhausted at the end of the day.

So, with that said, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Ben. Ben asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk a lot about Areas of Focus. What advice would you give to someone who hasn’t got time to write out their areas of focus? To me, that doesn’t honestly seem like a good use of my time. 

Thank you Ben for your question. 

Let me briefly explain what your Areas of Focus are. 

We all share eight areas of life. These are:

Family and relationships

Career or business

Health and fitness

Lifestyle and life experiences

Finances

Personal development

Spirituality

Life’s purpose

They all mean something to us. Yet, how we define them will be very individual. How we prioritise them will also be personal and will change as you go through life. 

When you are young your career and business area may be high on your priority list. Once you have a career or run a business, you may find other areas such as your life’s purpose and spirituality will rise up the list. 

I remember when I was in my twenties, I felt I was immortal. I smoked and enjoyed a beer or six on a Friday and Saturday night. Health and fitness was not a priority. 

When I reached thirty, I realised I was overweight and climbing the stairs was ridiculously hard. It left me puffing and panting embarrassingly. Something needed to change. So I reduced my drinking, eventually quit smoking and began running. Health and fitness shot up my list of priorities. 

The thing is, if you do not know how important these areas are to you, you will continue to ignore them. It’s surprisingly easy to develop horrible diseases such as diabetes if you have not prioritised health and fitness. 

And, of course, the elephant in the room. How many relationships have been destroyed because a person’s work takes over their life? 

Your time is limited. According to Oliver Burkeman, you have around 4,000 weeks. That’s it. And if you’re 40 years old, you’re around half way through those 4,000 weeks. Scary thought, right? 

So spending time defining what these areas mean to you is a critical first step to building a life that leaves you feeling fulfilled, energised and in balance with what is important to you. 

The way to do this is to download my free Areas of Focus workbook, which you can get from my website. That workbook will take you through the steps to dine your areas of focus and to pull out the actionable steps you can take to keep things in balance. 

These will range from simple tasks such as sending an amount of money to your savings each month. A task that will likely take you less than two minutes each month. To having a date night with your partner every Friday evening. 

Your health and fitness area is another one that does not require a lot of time. Twenty to thirty minutes a day. Think about that for a moment. Twenty to thirty minutes a day to protect your long-time health, keep you energised and help keep your weight down. That’s a no brainer.

Yet to me, the most useful part of developing your areas of focus is it makes prioritising your day easy. 

If you know what is important to you, you know what your priorities are.

For your work, if you know what is important to you in your career, you will be fifty percent of the way to knowing what your priorities are. 

For example, if your career goal is to become the CEO or head of a department, you can develop a career path that will take you towards achieving that goal. You will be clear about what experience you need to gain in order to move to the next promotion, what skills you need to develop and which areas you need to improve. 

The other fifty percent comes from knowing what your core work is. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. (Not the work you volunteer to do). The clue to this is often in your job title. A salesperson is employed to sell, not spend days in internal sales meetings. A teacher is employed to teach, not waste time dealing with student administration. 

Once you are clear about these, you will find planning your days easier and prioritising your work almost automatic. 

There is another way knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is it helps you to structure your week. 

If you decide that maintaining your health is a priority for you, you can open up your calendar and schedule in your exercise times. Similarly, if you enjoy weekends going on adventures with your friends, that can be managed in your calendar. 

With your work, once you know what your core work is, you can ensure you have sufficient time set aside for doing that work. For instance, if you are a software developer, how much time do you need to spend developing software so that you meet your deadlines? 

That might equate to four hours a day of undisturbed coding. If that’s the case, you can block that time out and get very strict about accepting meetings. 

Yet, none of this will be obvious if you have no idea what is important to you. You’ll find yourself being pulled and pushed into doing things that do not align with your values and areas. 

There’s a great quote from Jim Rohn which says:

“If you don't have a plan for what you want, then you will probably find yourself buying into someone else's plan and later find out that was not the direction you wanted to go. You've got to be the architect of your life.”

And that’s what your Areas of Focus do for you. It gives you a blueprint for the life you want to live. 

Once you know what your blueprint is, you can begin making changes to build the life you want to live. 

It’s funny because as I think about this, Ben, I’m reminded of what my life was like before I sat down to work out what I wanted for my life. 

I felt I was drifting. Everything that came at me appeared urgent. I was being pushed this way and then the next day I’d be pulled in another direction. Other people were telling me how I should be living my life. Even down to what I should be wearing, the kind of car I should be driving and the career I should be following. 

Yet, none of that was what I wanted. It was what other people wanted me to do. It wasn’t until I read The Ten natural laws of time and life Management by Hyrun Smith that I finally woke up and realised I did have a life worth living and I could build the life I wanted to live. 

And that’s when I sat down and worked on my Areas of Focus. The initial ideas were reasonably easy to write out. It became a little harder when I fine tuned them and pulled out the action steps I needed to follow consistently in order to stay on track. In total it took a few weeks to come up with a set of areas I was happy with. 

But it was worth it. Almost instantly my life changed. I was more focused, intentional and other people’s opinions about how I should be living my life were listened to, but if they did not align with what I had identified as being important to me, quietly rejected. 

Now one thing about your areas of focus is they will change. You will find yourself fine-tuning them from time to time. How you think about family and friends will be different when you have your first child or grandchild. 

Your career might be important today, but less so after you retire. 

You may not have discovered your purpose in life yet. I didn’t know what mine was until I was in my mid-thirties. But it’s worth thinking about as that one area has the potential to bring you so much joy and fulfilment. 

I get to help hundreds of people every day. Nothing can beat the feeling of receiving an email or a comment from someone I have been able to help. 

And that’s what your areas of focus will do for you. They give you focus, they show you what to prioritise and brings purpose and fulfilment into your life. 

To me establishing what your areas are is the most important part of building any time management and productivity system. Without these, you have no foundations and will be at the mercy of everyone else. 

I hope that has helped, Ben. Thank you for your question. And thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.