Quotes About Focus

expected to get the right things done.

And productivity for the knowledge worker means the ability to get the right things done. It means effectiveness.

During the process that precedes the decision, no mention is made of what the answer might be. This is done so that people will not be forced to take sides; once they have taken sides, a decision would be a victory for one side and a defeat for the other. Thus the whole process is focused on finding out what the decision is really about, not what the decision should be. Its result is a meeting of the minds that there is (or is not) a need for a change in behavior.

Drucker highlights two common ingredients: preparation with a clear purpose in mind ("why are we having this meeting?") and disciplined follow-up.

Effectiveness as an executive demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things.

Effective executives know where their time goes.

Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work.

Effective executives build on strengths

The focus on contribution counteracts one of the basic problems of the executive: the confusion and chaos of events and their failure to indicate by themselves which is meaningful and which is merely "noise." The focus on contribution imposes an organizing principle. It imposes relevance on events.

Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.

3. Individual self-development in large measure depends on the focus on contributions. The man who asks of himself, "What is the most important contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?" asks in effect, "What self-development do I need? What knowledge and skill do I have to acquire to make the contribution I should be making? What strengths do I have to put to work? What standards do I have to set myself?" 4.

Spellman often said that during his waking hours he was alone only twice each day, for 25 minutes each time:

The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.

What if instead we said, "Look at how you …" That would simply turn children's attention to the process and away from fixed-theory explanations.12

We can keep the tests and other potentially distracting elements in mind, but we have to keep our heads up further than that as we deal with the moment-to-moment interactions with students.

y si de pronto hablaba tanto de sí mismo, de su vida «anterior», solo lo hacía para distraer la atención de su persona.

Ansioso observaba sus propios pensamientos, siempre dispuesto a frenarlos. No quería olvidar ya nada más y repetía mentalmente los momentos recién pasados, como se repasan las palabras de una lengua extraña.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The will-parent must discipline the mind-child, avoiding both the opposite extremes commonly made in disciplining either children or thoughts: tyranny or permissiveness.

One of the reasons lust is bad (not the only reason) is that it makes you stupid. Like any addiction, it blinds your vision to everything else and focuses it on the one thing that is the object of your addiction.

Praying anywhere can easily become praying nowhere, just as praying anytime can easily become praying at no time. Everything in general becomes nothing in particular.

Over time, stress hormones from multitasking can damage memory centers in the brain. Focus on one task at a time for better efficiency and memory.

You have to keep your priorities straight, if you plan to do well in stocks.

In Chapter 8, I argued that personal vision, by itself, is not the key to releasing the energy of the creative process. The key is "creative tension," the tension between vision and reality. The most effective people are those who can "hold" their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly.

I would suggest that the fundamental "information problem" faced by managers is not too little information but too much information. What we most need are ways to know what is important and what is not important, what variables to focus on and which to pay less attention to—and we need ways to do this that can help groups or teams develop shared understanding.