Quotes About Focus

Concentration is that ability to not think about anything.

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.

The most important thing about priorities and posteriorities is not intelligent analysis but courage.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter Drucker

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.

If there is any one "secret" of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

1. What is our mission? 2. Who is our customer? 3. What does the customer value? 4. What are our results? 5. What is our plan?2

Is this still worth doing?" And if it isn't, he gets rid of it so as to be able to concentrate on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of his own job and in the performance of his organization.

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself. The task matters, and you are a servant.

Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily.

The job is, however, not to set priorities. That is easy. Everybody can do it. The reason why so few executives concentrate is the difficulty of setting "posteriorities"—that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle—and of sticking to the decision.

Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug. But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.

Only a clear, focused, and common mission can hold the organization together and enable it to produce results.

If you have a goal that you still postpone, that means, it's not one of your strengths

To do the most good requires saying no to pressures to stray, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.

Effectiveness is, after all, not a «subject», but a selfdiscipline.

2. Don't diversify, don't splinter, don't try to do too many things at once. This is, of course, the corollary to the 'do': be focused!

He looks up from his work and outward toward goals. He asks: "What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?" His stress is on responsibility.

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away "operating.

But if one can lock the door, disconnect the telephone, and sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with what I call a "zero draft"—the one before the first draft. From then on, one can indeed work in fairly small installments, can rewrite, correct, and edit section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence.

This is the "secret" of those people who "do so many things" and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.

De minimis non curat praetor (The magistrate does not consider trifles) said the Roman law almost two thousand years ago—but many decision-makers still need to learn it.

Setting a posteriority is also unpleasant. Every posteriority is somebody else's top priority. It is much easier to draw up a nice list of top priorities and then to hedge by trying to do "just a little bit" of everything else as well. This makes everybody happy. The only drawback is, of course, that nothing whatever gets done.