The is great, big bear of a difference between time and focus.

Time is a near infinite resource. You can always make more of it. I am extraordinarily busy, what with calls and meetings and deliverables and all the brick-a-brack that comes with running a company, but no matter how busy I get there is always a way to move tokens around and “find time” to complete a task.

Time scales because it stacks, you can multi-task and while there is a finite limit to how many things you can do at once, most of us — when we’re really being honest with ourselves — haven’t hit that wall yet.

Focus, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal. Focus is the difference between doing something and doing it well. Focus is the ability not just to complete to task but to expand upon it to make it something greater. Time fuels tasks, focus fuels creativity.

• Art takes focus.
• Design takes focus.
• Writing takes focus.
• Building a company takes focus.

Unfortunately, focus is a very limited resource and those of us who build ideas (myself included) forget this far more often than we should.

Look at it like this.

How many times have you taken a peek under the hood of your car and realized that while the engine looks clean and it runs just fine, that it could use an oil change and the transmission fluid is a little burnt and the tires could probably get rotated and the brakes probably need a little servicing (I’m channeling the ghost of my dead car right now). Sure you could do all of this, but come on it will probably run for another thousand miles before it needs to be serviced and surely you have a lot better things to do right this second.

If you were focused on keeping your car (or your project) in top shape, you would take care of this before you absolutely needed to. You would start planning ahead, you might even look at preventative maintenance to make certain that anything you might have missed isn’t going to come back to haunt you a few thousand miles down the road. You would be proactive, vested and you would work not against your to-do list but against the ideal of how good your vehicle could be.

Where we go wrong as entrepreneurs is that we try to split our focus like we split our time. We try to stack it and it’s not until it’s too late that we realize that focus simply doesn’t stack. When we try, something will always suffer and while we will be able to do more stuff, we will be accomplishing all of it less effectively.

What’s the solution?

Well, if you can manage it, learn to focus on a small number of tasks and to recognize that the half dozen other things that you are doing will be done at maintenance level, at best. This is not something that should upset you, it’s just a matter of prioritization.

If you can’t manage to do that, you’re left with trying to integrate all your projects into a coherent vision that you can focus on, but that’s a big topic and the subject of another post.

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