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How to Stay Focused
This week, in anticipation of the second session of Life of Focus, I’ve been sharing lessons about centering your life back onto what matters. For those who missed the previous lessons, check them out here.
Today, for the final lesson, I want to talk not about making changes, but about making them last.
Productivity is especially prone to bursts of enthusiasm followed by burnout. You get an idea for a new working routine, schedule or system. Maybe you even stick with it for a couple weeks. But, before long, everything has regressed.
How can you make focus last?
Why Focus Fails
Part of the problem is simply that the initial commitment to focus needs to be long enough, to have a chance to sustain long-term habits. One reason Cal and I chose to make Life of Focus a three-month course was to give students the time to build a solid foundation.
Studies of habit changing bear this out. While twenty-one or thirty days is often cited as the “correct” time to make a new habit, researchers that studied this found the average was actually over sixty days.[1] And this was only an average, harder habits required almost a year before they felt effortless.
The lesson is simple: if you care about making a change in your life last long-term, you need to make it a priority for your life for more than a few weeks.
