Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, has one-word themes every year. It's meant to guide you, in a big-picture kind of way, through the year. It's been a few years since I've read her book, but tonight, I browsed her website and was reminded of the wonderful lessons I had learned when I read her book. Of course, the many lessons learned have either been forgotten or were never put into practice. That's okay though, I probably wasn't ready to commit to a project anyway. So I thought, maybe I will start small and have a one-word theme for this year.
I want to practice focus this year. For too long I've been distracted and wandered, which is not entirely bad, but it meant that I tip-toed around real issues that I should be dealing with and avoided thinking about things that mattered in my life. There has always been a hurricane of scattered thoughts in my head and too many desires/ambitions that drive me restless. I want to freeze all this and start organizing everything into something comprehendible to provide the clarity I need.
Somewhere on the web I remember reading a headline that said "the power of doing one thing at a time". I didn't click into the article, just the title alone struck a chord with me already. Since the art of multi-tasking has become second nature to our generation, I find it hard to recall when I actually just did ONE thing at a time. When I'm on the computer, I usually have music on and have at least 5 tabs open in my browser, all actively used. When I'm eating, I'm also either watching TV or reading something. When I reading, I check my phone every ~15 minutes and DJ my music as need be. When I'm writing, I switch back and forth between my writing and other websites/eat snacks/check my phone… etc. You get the idea. The only time I really just do one thing is probably when I go to sleep. The point is, I want to focus on doing one thing at a time, and do it well. On a bigger scale, I want to focus on different pillars of my life individually and giving them my undivided attention. I want to focus on my goals. I want to focus on learning how to prioritize. I want to focus on being in the present/live in the moment. I want to focus on the awareness of my thoughts, my surroundings, and the people around me.
Paradoxically, I think practicing focus will actually allow me to accomplish more things than multi-tasking before. I guess time will tell.