2021: The Year of Focus

I quit making New Year’s resolutions years ago. They always felt fake, and I never stuck with them.

A few years ago, I took a different approach, adopting an idea from a mentor of mine. Instead of making a New Year’s resolution, my mentor establishes a New Year’s theme, a gestalt approach to each new year. His New Year’s themes have included: The Year of Taking Control, The Year of Unapologetic Mastery, The Year of Now, The Year of Follow-Through, and The Year of Being Adventurous.

New Year’s resolutions tend to be tactical in nature, focusing on a specific behavior or result, which is exactly why I do not like them. I prefer strategy to tactics. Once I stopped making New Year’s resolutions and started establishing New Year’s themes, I enjoyed the experience of planning the coming year a lot more and followed through on my goals more often.

I first established a New Year’s theme in 2017.

At the time, I had a big fear of failure. Being a perfectionist, I saw failure as final and wanted to change my relationship with it. So I made 2017 The Year of Failure and pursued opportunities where I would probably fail over opportunities where I would probably succeed.

The fear of failure made me dig deeper and push myself harder. As a result, I grew faster and achieved more in 2017 than I thought I could. I developed confidence in my ability to rise to the challenge and adopted the belief that, if I did not fail regularly, I was not challenging myself enough.

To this day, I pursue opportunities where I will probably fail because those are the opportunities that result in the most growth.

The following year, 2018, was The Year of Self-Care.

By the end of 2017, I was exhausted and realized I needed to take better care of myself. I had burned the candle at both ends and in the middle for an entire year, personally and professionally, and had the stress and anxiety to back it up.

I started seeing a therapist. I ate better and worked out more. I enjoyed more “me” time. I worked on my sleep habits.

By the end of 2018, I was back on track and everything was running smoothly. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy and ready to take on the world. So I made 2019 The Year of Discomfort to swing myself hard in the opposite direction once again.

Plunging head first into the frigid waters of Lake Michigan in Chicago on January 1, 2019 was an unforgettable experience and one hell of a way to greet the new year. I have never been so cold in my entire life. Emerging from the surf, I stood in water up to my waist—and up to most people’s chest—feeling the razor-sharp Chicago winter wind cut across my skin. My feet burned, and my lungs filled with cold winter air.

I never felt so alive.

By the time I reached the shore, my beard was no longer wet. The water in my beard had turned to ice and remained in that state until my buddy and I got into his car and cranked the heat, waiting to thaw out so our fingers could move enough to tie our shoes.

Growth lives at the edge of our comfort zone. If we want to grow, we must constantly walk, timidly at times, to the edge of our comfort zone, looking for ways to make ourselves uncomfortable.

Eventually, I learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Now when I feel comfortable, I feel uncomfortable. I like being near the edge of my comfort zone. Life is more exciting that way.

When 2020 started, I forgot to establish a New Year’s theme due to personal, professional, and, as you can imagine, society-at-large reasons. In the last few months of the year after many long conversations with my dad about a multitude of topics and a lot of reflection on my life and the challenges facing our world today, it hit me that 2020 was The Year of No Right Answers.

Whether politics or pandemics, relationships or racial injustice, there are no right answers to the most important issues. Often, there are many wrong answers, but there is rarely—if ever—a clear-cut, singular, universally agreed upon right answer. There can only be a “most-right” answer for the most important issues. Even then, every person discussing each issue will have their own most-right answer based on their values and beliefs. Remembering and recognizing that each individual has their own “most-right” answer was helpful in 2020 when chaos reigned supreme.

To say 2020 was distracting is an understatement. Midway through the year, I noticed my ability to focus had disappeared. I had difficulty staying on task. I was juggling too many projects at once, and my performance on every project started to slip. Not one to be satisfied with average or below average performance, I knew something had to change.

As I do with most challenges I face in life, I started reading books to learn how to regain control over attention.

I reconfigured my phone, deleting distracting apps—except Instagram—and disabling notifications for most of the remaining apps, including Instagram. I set up alerts in RescueTime to notify me when I spent more computer time than intended on specific applications and websites. In August, I created a spreadsheet to track the ten most-used apps on my iPhone each week since Screen Time displays only four weeks of data and four weeks of data is not enough data for an analytical guy like me.

Then, I sat back and listened to what the data told me.

Based on what I learned from my near-obsessive tracking of phone and computer usage data, I had two major distractions throughout 2020: my phone and social media platforms, including dating apps.

For most people, myself included, phones are the biggest distraction in the world today. In 2019, RescueTime analyzed the phone usage data of 11,000 of its users and found most people use their phone 3 hours and 15 minutes per day. Zooming out, that means the average person spends 1,183 hours per year on their phone. Put another way, the average person spends 29.6 standard, 40-hour workweeks per year using their phone.

When I began tracking my screen time in August 2020, I averaged 14 hours per week on my phone. In other words, I was on track to spend 728 hours per year using my phone, or 18.2 standard, 40-hour workweeks. To further put that in perspective, if my full-time job starting in January was to use my phone, my phone use would “keep me employed” through the end of April. The average person would be “employed” through the second half of July.

By the end of 2020, I had spent more than 47 hours of my life using social media platforms on my computer alone. I still logged at least two hours of Instagram use on my phone every week. That was after I disabled notifications and made a conscious, concerted effort to limit my time on Instagram. There were times in the first half of 2020 when I logged two or three hours on Instagram in a single day, for multiple days in a row.

If I assume—extremely generously—I spent only two hours per week using Instagram in 2020, I would have spent 104 hours using Instagram in 2020. Assuming three hours per week, my Instagram usage would have been 156 hours. I know it was more. I would both love and hate to know what my Instagram usage really was; it would be fascinatingly depressing. 

I am only picking on Instagram because I deleted Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn from my phone long ago. Instagram conveniently offers no ability to publish content using a computer. A phone is required to publish content. That is not an accident; that is deliberate engineering, social engineering perhaps. The product management team at Instagram did not forget to add that feature.

Suffice it to say, I spent lots of time—too much time—using my phone and social media platforms last year. And, given my ambitious goals for 2021, I need all the time I can get to achieve my goals this year.

That said, I picked my New Year’s theme for 2021: The Year of Focus.

My theme is simple but difficult: I will rebuild my ability to focus. It will require tough decisions and sacrifices, but it will be worth the effort.

Focus is rare, which makes it valuable, especially today’s world when so few people can focus on anything. That should come as no surprise since our home and work environments have become one and neither environment on its own promotes focus. Our homes are filled with distractions, and work is no better with its open concept offices, nonstop communication (read: noise), mandatory multi-tasking, and more. (Donuts, anyone?) Add to all that the distraction machine we keep at arm’s reach 24 hours per day with its relentless pings and dings, and you have the ingredients for a distracted mind.

With so many distractions, how will I rebuild my ability to focus and rewire my brain to work the way it used to work before social media and smartphones ruined it? I will eliminate the nonessentials, limit the essentials, and fill the space with what matters more to me. Then, I will strengthen my focus by exercising it. 

If the first step to increasing focus is decreasing distractions, I started strong, targeting social media and my phone.

On January 1, 2021, I deleted my social media accounts, specifically Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I did not deactivate my accounts; I deleted them completely. Well, almost. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter graciously gave me 30 days feel the fear of missing out, reconsider my decision, and come crawling back. LinkedIn gave only 20 days because even LinkedIn knows it has become nothing more than Facebook’s uncool, socially awkward neighbor. While I am only three days into my social media exodus’s grace periods, I am confident I can weather the FOMO storm and stay the course.

I have already made great strides in limiting my phone use. When Screen Time launched in June 2018, I enabled it immediately. To my shock and horror, I logged more than 28 hours of screen time in one week. 28 hours is 25% of the 112 “awake hours” in a week, or three and a half eight-hour workdays.

By the time I made my screen time spreadsheet in August 2020, my phone use had dropped to 14 hours per week. I dropped below 10 hours per week in mid-September. My 10 most-used apps burned only 53 minutes of my time the week of Christmas, only an hour and thirteen minutes last week. So I am making progress. Still, I know how easy it is to spend time staring at my phone and plan to stay vigilant in limiting the amount of time I spend using my phone and other tools I need to use but want to control.

Taking those two actions—eliminating social media from my life and limiting my phone use—will go a long way towards helping me improve my focus and concentration this year. With the time I save, I will do more of what matters to me: spending time with my family, including my dog Summer, reading, writing, cooking, exercising, listening to and playing music, and more interests I have yet to try or discover.

What about my family and friends? How will I stay connected to them without social media? 

I will pick up the phone and call them, schedule a video chat, send them an email, write them a thoughtful letter on my typewriter, visit them in person and share a meal, meet them for a cup of coffee, etc. There are plenty of ways to connect with the people who matter to me.

What about your professional network? How will you network without social media?

I will send thoughtful emails to people I want to meet and keep in touch with people I already know. With as noisy as social media has become, email is overlooked and underappreciated as a networking tool. I love getting thoughtful emails from people, even if I do not know them. What I hate is getting generic spray-and-pray emails from people, even if I know them. Also, the communication channels I use for family and friends work for coworkers and colleagues, too. Business is personal after all.

What about your personal brand? How will you stay relevant in your industry without social media?

There are countless ways to stay relevant in my industry without a social media presence. I will publish thoughtful and thought-provoking articles like this one on my website and share those articles with my email subscribers. I will contribute to the Salesforce community, answering questions in forums, attending events, sharing knowledge, etc. I will lead groups and conversations, shaping how people think. Posting on LinkedIn will pale in comparison to those other actions. My personal brand will be just fine.

What about people who do not have your personal contact information?

They can google me. I am not a difficult person to find. The contact form on my website works. They are welcome to use it.

Hopefully, that brief, unsolicited Q&A allayed any fears that I would disappear off the face of the earth upon deleting my social media accounts. That said, people will not hear from me as often as they have heard from me in the past, though I might be exaggerating my own importance and overestimating how often people actually want to hear from me. Perhaps my social media exodus will be a breath of fresh air for some, or most. Regardless, my exit from the world of distractions allows me to enter the world of focus. 

For years, I was in a state of almost-permanent distraction. I wanted to change that. Now I am.