The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. – from Excellent Advice for Living

We can summarize this advice as focus on what’s important. I too often see authors and others get distracted from the main point on which they are writing. I see this in meetings when people start to speculate about something related (or even unrelated) and forget the purpose of the work.

This becomes an even bigger issue when someone goes off to work on a project for a period of time and drifts away from their original goal or focus. You might think you don’t do this, but I bet most of you do. I know I do. I sometimes start to change my focus, thinking the current thing I’m working on is more important than the main goal.

An example is that I might be working on a new presentation. I’ll start to outline the talk, add some bullets and notes, maybe think about demos, etc. At some point, I get distracted with which pictures make my point and I start to waste time on choosing pictures, rather than remembering that the point of the talk isn’t a picture, it’s to teach something. The picture might help, but it’s not the most important thing and it’s not where I should spend a lot of time.

Today’s interruption culture of having notifications, slack, email, etc. available on devices makes this worse. The large amount of things we often engage in at any one time also makes this hard.

Focusing on what you want to achieve and keeping that in mind is important. For presentations, I often put my abstract in the first slide notes, so that I remember what I’m focusing on. For coaching, we often list a few things we want to work on, and as we run drills or evaluate the practice we can look back and see where our focus is. What was the main thing.

Keep the main thing the main thing.

I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.