chapter 10

‘F’ – Focus and failure

This chapter will focus on embracing and handling failure, and learning from it in order to make massive progress. We are into a lot of deep learning now, and I am sure it’s hard to retain focus even just working through these chapters. However, continued and renewed focus is the only way you can develop sustained momentum and also gain a greater understanding of yourself. We don’t just need to rely on ourselves either – we can seek mentors to help us, and we need to learn to work in short bursts – or sprints – of activity to keep going, going and going!

Focus on creating a to-do list that works for you

We all know about the ‘to-do’ list thing – it rapidly becomes completely full, and therefore impossible to complete.

The main thing here is to avoid creating what I call a ‘to-do list to-do list’ – you know, ‘I must put together a to-do list to put together a list of all the things I need to do’. If you need to do this, you’ve got too much to do!

There are many theories of productivity that can underpin how to handle this. The ‘Ivy Lee Method’, for example, was allegedly implemented in 1918 by Charles M. Schwab (then one of the richest men in the world), who loved to find an edge over his competition, and by consultant Ivy Lee (a successful businessperson and a key figure in the foundation of public relations). It’s a long story, often told in endless blogs on the subject if you want to dive into them, but basically Mr Lee was invited to speak to Mr Schwab’s top executives about how, through implementing a simple process, he could achieve peak productivity. At the end of each work day, he suggested writing down the six most important things needing to be accomplished tomorrow, prioritised in order, and definitely no more than six tasks allowed. He advised that you should concentrate only on the first task and work on it until it was done before moving on to the second task – repeating the same process every day.

So, what’s so hard about that? Well, soon our to-do list turns into 10, 20, 50 bullets, right? We try to get to the bottom of the list, but we never do. We get new ideas, we add, we iterate, we expand. We are also, typically, terrible at estimating how long our lovingly documented tasks take, aren’t we? One thing I found was that my first task of the day frequently took the whole of my morning slot to ‘get it done’, which of course had the effect of the to-do list rolling into tomorrow, and then likely the next day as well. It might be thought, therefore, that to-do lists actually allow us to avoid what’s important, or what might create the most impact in our lives, and that, maybe, we use them to put off doing the things we don’t want to do – the hard stuff.

In this context, the one thing on your list you should accomplish today is probably the one you don’t want to do – it’s the hardest one. By tackling it and getting on with it, you can absolutely change your day – it will be a weight off your shoulders. Getting on with it as soon as you finish the meditation/gratitude-exercise part of your day will really help you.

Many of the people writing on this subject don’t always account for the complexities, emergencies and unexpected events that so often hit us in life. However, limiting the number of tasks you need to do in the first place is something that pretty much everyone agrees on.

Revisit your to-do list – what do you really need to get done today/tomorrow? What five things will really move you forward?

Learn to. . .  test and learn

Did I read that right? Did I write that right? Yes! Okay, let’s dive into this – what exactly does ‘test and learn’ mean? For me, I’d rather think in terms of ‘testing’ than having to get everything right every time! Test and learn is a concept that has sprung up from some of the marketing practices of retailers, financial services and other consumer-focused companies, and is connected to the previous chapters as it is a means by which you can freely try new approaches to getting stuff done. We don’t need to get hung up on closely measuring the effect of a new change for now – let’s just see how it feels and try some new stuff.

We’ve already worked out how to be more prepared, how to plan, not over-thinking or over-planning beforehand, getting started and then refining following reflection after you’ve begun. This is iteration – you are already doing it, so let’s take it to the next level.

I think some of the best things you can do don’t take very long. How many times have you put off doing something, big, small, interesting, banal, and then finally pulled yourself up on your bootstraps and done it? What is the overriding sensation you feel? Satisfaction? Probably not. It’s more like ‘huh, well that wasn’t so hard after all’. Possibly you are also saying to yourself: ‘You are an idiot. Why did it take so long?’

I have found that, in my life, I do everything in iterations, chunks and bursts of activities. Think more like Usain Bolt rather than a marathon runner. There’s nothing wrong with running a marathon to get to your ‘target self’, but there is also nothing wrong with short bursts of intense activity to make rapid progress.

Another great thing about taking an iterative approach is that it is set up as an approach to support learning – sure you have a ‘goal’ for what you are trying to do, but, even working in short sprints, sometimes you won’t get everything done. Some things you’ll recognise you need to improve on. Let’s get into more detail on this.

Think in sprints of activity

Within Agile, sprints or ‘iterations’ are essentially short periods of fixed time where work is broken down into a set of actions. These ‘timeboxed’ sprints are fixed to ensure that the rigour we’ve been applying is applied regularly – so no longer than one month and most commonly two weeks, then track progress and re-plan. The principal method of tracking is the same daily stand-up you’ve been doing (called daily scrums in Agile, and obviously with more team members than just you!).

Here is something I want you to begin to apply before whatever your chosen ‘sprint duration’ might be: start with something called ‘sprint planning’ – a specific event that aims to define a few things that are useful concepts that just might resonate with you.

Typically, you would develop a sprint ‘backlog’ – this is the concept of identifying the set of tasks/work you think you can do in that time period before you reach the end (‘the sprint goal’). This work should inform the achievements of your ‘target self’ personal vision of yearly objectives. Each sprint ends with a sprint retrospective that reviews progress – to ‘tick off’ what you have done and also identify lessons you have learned and therefore improvements you can implement for your next sprint. Again, remember, you may not achieve in every ‘sprint’ you do, but that is okay – just LEARN from this! What did you fail to complete in the sprint? Next time you do it, use this lesson to reappraise your estimated forecast of what you think you can achieve.

If this feels natural and achievable, another Agile/scrum principle that might help you take things to the next level is its emphasis on creating (or ‘shipping’) a working product at the end of the sprint to show the work really has been done. In the case of software development, where this methodology has mainly come from, this usually means the product has been fully tested, integrated and documented. How to apply this? One extension to the basic planning of those tasks you feel it’s possible to do within one sprint is to focus on grouping tasks together that sit logically with one another and, when combined and finished, constitute ‘something’ as completely done. This does not mean ‘finished’, of course, as much of your activity might take you the whole year to complete, but maybe a ‘chunk’ of something is done: a chapter of a book (or an essay!), for example; a new basic website that has a number of pages, all of the links work, all of the content is there, even if you know you are going to evolve it and create more pages in due course; or perhaps a social media account with content?

Another interesting concept to consider is the idea of picking objectives and tasks and doing some detailed thinking on their scope and nature, and if they can be split up or approached in a different way (called ‘elaboration’ in Agile). You might even choose to put some ideas back into your ‘backlog’ (the things you know you want/need to do, but have not got to yet in a sprint).

I know that is a lot to take in, but the basic principles are pretty straightforward. Decide (according to the experiences of working on your objectives to-date and the general circumstances of your life) what your ‘sprint’ or iteration duration is going to be. I settled on two weeks after a lot of trial and error. Begin each one of these weeks by holding a more detailed daily planning session to identify which of your objectives you intend to tackle first, and the tasks you already know are inherent in that. Have a think whether the tasks are ‘right’ – can they be broken down further? Are there things, in retrospect, you might want to tweak and change? Are there any lessons from your regular review (I do mine quarterly, you might choose to do it more frequently) that you want to apply?

What’s going well?

When you reach a natural pause point in your journey, at the end of each stretch of work, remember that you should do a retrospective. The best way to think of these is as the type of review you never actually end up doing at work – the campaign review you meant to do before you started on the next campaign or the end-of-quarter performance review that became more about filling in a set of PowerPoint slides rather than actual reflecting!

So, let’s pick out the highlights of what you’ve done well in this first stretch of work (it might be a week, a month, but I’m guessing maybe it’s more like six weeks for many of you). What went well? Has the new routine bedded in well? How about the individual tasks against the objectives you set? How have they gone? If you are anything like me, a mix of ‘easier than I expected’ and a larger set of ‘took me so long to do it’ or ‘did it, but really underestimated it’ might be what you are thinking! This is totally to be expected. Keep a close eye on the things you are happy with as you progress.

Before you get too judgemental on yourself, I’m guessing you’ve managed to complete at least one thing, right? So, that’s gone well? You’ve discovered a new podcast you love? Great! You smashed at least one objective and you are now already reaping the reward? Well done.

You’ve taken a step – a big step. Although that might be hard to connect with right now, you’ve proven to yourself that you can commit to something and follow through. Congratulations! (See, other people are giving you credit already!)

What’s not gone so well?

Now let’s dive into some of the more negative areas of the retrospective. Did you find any of the blockers we covered in Chapter 7 come back to haunt you and hinder your progress?

I suggest re-reading your ‘splinter list’ to see if it is any of these culprits. Remember, you OWN these people, things or feelings – they are on one of your (my?!?) lists! Seriously – I know it is hard, but even being able to connect those splinters to a lack of progress on a specific task is an incredible breakthrough, isn’t it? You now know why you are stuck or maybe don’t follow through as you’d like to? That is pretty awesome, isn’t it?

Okay, so with the ‘reasons’ clearly in mind, now delve a little deeper. What is going on overall for you? Apart from the ‘task’ level of doing stuff, how is it feeling? Are you embracing the learning experience as well as the ‘doing stuff’ bit of it?

Have you reviewed your ‘day plan’ and tried tweaking things, or just persisted with it? I love the commitment, but if something in particular is just not clicking (not in a ‘Wow! It’s tough to do X’ kind of way, but in a truly ‘I’m not happy with the way it is working out at all’ way), then try to tweak it – try a little more or a little less and see where it gets you. Do not see addressing things that have not gone well as a negative or failure.

Better ‘quality’ time management

When it comes down to it, no matter how much you plan and ‘get ready’, you’ve got to DO SOMETHING that gets you closer to your ‘target self’ personal vision. This means getting in front of your laptop, tablet, typewriter or notebook and working to complete things. Even if you are following my suggestion of making this only three to five key actions each day, you still run the risk of running over time and getting distracted.

So, in case it’s useful, here are a few tips to support your daily practice – and to make sure you maximise the time you do devote to those development tasks that support your ‘target self’ personal vision.

According to Tony Schwartz of ‘The Energy Project’, we generally don’t handle our days very well. For example:

• Only one out of three people takes a real lunch break – that does not mean eating at your desk while working, by the way!
• A single microbreak (of thirty seconds to five minutes) can improve your mental performance by an average of 13%.
• As humans, we naturally move from having full focus and energy to devote to a task to physiological fatigue every 90 minutes.
• The most productive people actually spend 52 minutes working, followed by a 17-minute break.

Interestingly, also according to Schwartz, multi-tasking creates 7–9% more errors in your work. So, how can we apply some of this? The Pomodoro Technique, a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s,suggests:

• decide on the task to be done;
• set the timer to 25 minutes;
• work on the task until the timer rings;
• take a short five-minute break;
• repeat four times;
• take a 15–30-minute break!

What do you think? Does this connect with you? If so, guess what – try it! As distraction is your enemy in many cases, this allows you to focus on not being distracted as there is a timer on you!

However, my suggestion is to make this contextual and to plan for when you focus on tasks. I would recommend also grabbing ‘mini opportunities’ to do substantive work over and above any time you might set aside daily – for example, during your commute before you ‘begin your day job’. These can be great times to focus. However, a warning – I literally wrote this passage on a Thameslink train to London and I missed my stop!

Lessons learned from this: I got locked into a real ‘flow’ state for all the right reasons, but got that wrong outcome because I did not plan my work within a defined period of time. I mean, I could have set an alarm on my phone or something at least! I still made my 10am meeting on time, but I was a little sweatier, a little less focused, had not gone through my resumé of what I wanted to get out of it, and winged it a little more than I would have liked.

Understanding urgent vs important

Wow! This is a good one! The Eisenhower Matrix (pictured) offers a framework for judging a common issue when actually doing tasks – what is urgent to do versus what is simply important.

The Eisenhower Matrix https://luxafor.com/the-eisenhower-matrix/

For what it’s worth, my order of tackling this list is as follows:

1. 1Urgent/Important – as it says on the diagram, do it now, and do it FIRST in your daily task list.
2. 2Not Urgent/Important – decide if you want to schedule time to do it. This is a tough one – I always ask ‘why’ it is not urgent, as often a crucial future piece of work is hidden in these lists! Will it become urgent and important if not addressed? For me, this would be second on the ‘to-do’ list.
3. 3Not Urgent/Not Important – this is a potential ‘delegate’ task according to this methodology, but in personal terms, these are often more ‘important’ than they appear at face value, so do consider if you can do it yourself, or delegate it only if you have a resource you can trust to deliver it for you. This would be third on the ‘to-do’ list.
4. 4Not Urgent/Not Important – as it says on the tin, delete!! Seriously, you need to minimise the things you are focused on so this would be one easy one to remove.

Failure is not failure

The dictionary definitions of failure are hard to get away from – literally meaning a lack of success, or the neglect or omission of expected or required action. Some of the synonyms for it are equally pernicious: defeat, frustration, collapse, floundering, misfiring, coming to nothing, or falling through. An alternative definition describes failure as when you don’t comply with the basic rules.

Wow! So, no wonder we are all so scared of it. Time to reframe what failure is – and what it is for you.

It is okay to not get it right first time.

It is okay to not get it right the second time.

In fact, it is okay if it takes you a very long time to get there – this is such a valuable learning opportunity. It has made you stronger. You’ll not do things in the same way again, will you? You’ll try something new (‘test and learn’), you’ll do it slightly differently – you might even end up doing it better.

Remember what we discussed in the work on blockers and unleashing your energy? No one owns what you do, and no one is judging you apart from yourself (and if they are, that is their problem to handle, not yours). There is no need to see your failure to do something as a failure. Instead it is an opportunity to grow, so, as usual, laugh, chin up and let’s go again on the next sprint.

Doing things in manageable boxed-in stretches of work is a game-changer. It stops the temptation to commit to a huge volume of tasks, in a never-ending series of weeks of trying – and we’ve all been there, I am sure. Reviewing, really reviewing, how things are going rather than just ploughing into new tasks was an extremely hard habit for me to establish as a regular part of my life. It’s not that I never looked back and did this, but I could not say, hand on heart, that I did it every time, or implemented what I learned. Having better task discipline is also key and multiplies your productivity. As for viewing failure as a negative – absolutely not, never again, no way.

Consider getting some mentors

The idea of needing mentors to help us has been well written about – however, so few of us actually have a formal (or informal) one. Why is this? Again, I believe this is due to a focus on what is ‘weak’ about needing help. We feel we should know it all. We should not need help. Why can’t we just find the strength within ourselves? For me, the crucial element here is that we need people we can trust to help break through this extremely limited thinking. Why should we know the answers? Why should we not need help?

Ask yourself if you know all the answers – really ask yourself if you believe this to be true? I’m guessing 99% of you can accept you don’t. It is totally okay for this to be the case. In fact, practise embracing that idea for a second – literally say out loud ‘I don’t know everything. I need some help – and that’s okay’. Tried it? How many of you hesitated? I know I did when I first began to do this. In fact, the first few times I literally could not say the words – I was struggling against the notion that I could not do everything I needed to do to achieve all of my goals myself. If I just focused a little more, just tried a little harder, it would all work out. The truth is, focusing and working harder is a huge part of the puzzle, but we need guidance and support too.

So, just go with me on this – accept you need help and that you don’t know all of the answers (or maybe not even some of the answers!), so getting someone to help you figure them out might be useful.

I define my mentors who help me with my personal focus in three ways:

• virtual mentors
• physical mentors
• visualised mentors.

Virtual mentors

We have covered a lot on reading, learning and consuming video content to help you achieve your aims (see Chapter 4), but to get you in the right mindset I encourage you to identify early on those people you connect with who could be your ‘virtual mentor’. They are not necessarily someone you personally interact with (although many motivational gurus do offer coaching and ‘masterclasses’ on their particular philosophy), but will be someone you can tune into and use as a mentor. This could be through learning from their experiences or how they built their own success story. As a side note to this, I also use some people as an example of what ‘I don’t want to be’. I don’t labour too long on their content as I think this is a somewhat risky strategy as it leads to the dark side of hate and negativity – but it is useful sometimes to have a visible emblem of what you don’t want.

Physical mentors

Physical mentors are people you can meet with in your real life (albeit you might do so over a video call) to work through what you are trying to achieve. They may take a number of forms. For example, some people will connect with general ‘coaches’ who are able to work with them on their overall attitude and mindset and be a sounding board. This is particularly useful for those of you who struggle to share with others. Other people might want someone who has literally ‘done’ what they aspire to do, to be able to really interrogate how they did it and what keeps them there. Some people will want both types of support – I do, for example – as it helps give you a variety of different perspectives and input. I’ve included some resources for finding a coach in the ‘Further reading’ section of this text, but finding a mentor who is already ‘doing what you want to do’ can sometimes be a bit more challenging. However, in my experience, people are actually more approachable than they may at first seem and will be willing to help within agreed parameters. The prominence of social media also means that people are more searchable and reachable than ever – all you need to do is pluck up the courage to send a polite instant message to them along the lines of: ‘Hi X, my name is Y. I am a great admirer of what you’ve achieved. I am looking for a mentor to help coach me to get to a similar place in my own career. Would you be willing to explore this? If so, please let me know the best way to arrange a time to speak.’ Copy this and give it a try!

Visualised mentors

To begin to develop a strong ‘target self’, or manifestation of your hopes, dreams and desires, have a think about the people you are aware of (either living or passed) who are an obvious inspiration to you – people you don’t need to think too hard to come up with but just instinctively think of when you visualise achievement and being more like the person you want to be, or the life you want to create. Make a note of this person. Write down what it is about them you like – what you want to have. Recognise what language you are using – what ‘things’ are important? Just free associate and write a stream of consciousness. As hard as it is, don’t censor yourself – this is just for you. Don’t write what you think is politically correct or what would be an accepted norm. If you desire the physical or financial things they have, put this down. If you like who they are and what they stand for, put this down.

The key for all of these mentor types is to teach yourself to receive constructive feedback and, in some cases, criticism. Again, as hard as it is, we need to reframe criticism as an additional way to improve and progress, not as a mark of failure. Consider failure to be something that can be a friend to you – to help you learn. Areas of weakness can become strengths – you just need to be aware of them to improve on them. So, again, if one of these mentors identifies directly or implicitly a ‘fault’ or weakness in you, see this as a fantastic opportunity to make a positive change. There is, however, a significant health warning that comes with this: if you ever feel truly judged to the point that deep down inside you don’t think the person you are being mentored by is coming from an open and honest place, trust your instincts and move on to a more positive support system.

Steps to execute your plan every day

Moving my working life into a series of ‘sprints’ of activity, followed by a ‘stop’ and period of reflection every two weeks, has really helped me achieve my objectives. You choose what works best for you, but I found that only one week, while building moments, never quite seems long enough to cope with the unexpected challenges life throws at you!

Remember – the key is to become comfortable iterating things – do it in chunks with short-term goals, then review. Then repeat, and repeat!

If you want more

If this chapter has piqued your interest, you can find more resources, including videos and workbooks, at www.drgeraintevans.com