Kia ora,

I’m not a big fan of Ariana Grande’s music, but I have taken the message of her hit song “Focus” to heart for this week’s issue.

Well, maybe not all of the lyrics, but certainly the sentiment of honing in on a few key areas in my professional life.

Putting areas of life on pause is tough, especially if it’s something you value. Today’s issue talks about how to get ruthless about prioritising in order to really achieve focus.

I would love to hear how you cultivate focus in your life, so please do hit reply and hit me with your best tips!

Estimated Read time: 5 minutes 16 seconds

The Deep Dive: Time to put the blinders on? 🎯

Focus is the main way I'm working smarter not harder this year.

There will always be more that you could do: more business ideas/lines of business, more initiatives, more hobbies, more opportunities.

The trap that a lot of multi-passionate people fall into (myself included) is holding on to too many priorities because we think that if we move something to the backburner, we will never get around to it.

That if something is no longer a priority right now, it never will be.

In my last year of high school, there were a huge number of teachers who said "go to university straight away, otherwise you'll get too used to earning money and will never study."

However, as much as I enjoyed learning and academia, I realised that I had no idea what I wanted to do, and while learning is never wasted, a £40k student loan could be.

So I took 2 gap years: the first where I went to Germany on a work and travel visa, travelled and improved my German fluency. The second year I worked 50-60 hours per week across retail, hospitality and as a radio station promo girl before eventually returning to university.

And while I was admittedly a little disgruntled about returning to be a student, I was very much done with working jobs that had no progression/weren't mentally stimulating.

I also had more of an idea of what I wanted to do by that point, so I headed to uni at age 20 and blitzed through it 🔥

At the time, it hit me that if something is really important to you, you will return to it. And if you don't return to it, there's a chance it wasn't for you in the first place.

Despite this key learning happening relatively early in life, I feel as though I became worse at applying this focus as I've gotten older.

I blame it on a feeling of urgency to achieve career success, financial freedom, fluency in 4 languages, peak physical condition, lifelong relationships all at the same time, and all before the age of 30. 🥵

But the secret to being successful at any one thing is giving yourself the permission to let go of some things in order to say yes to others.

At the start of the year, I thought I had three areas of focus:

• Growing my agency business, newsletter & personal brand

• Delivering on my objectives in my fractional role

• Hitting my personal goals around property, finance, health & relationships

However, once I dove in, I realised how massive each of those focus areas is, and there was no way I could humanly deliver on them all.

So I asked myself, what's really important that I achieve in the next 6 months?

And the answer was:

• Fulfil my obligations to my fractional role (which takes up 4 days per week) until its completion

• Grow my newsletter

• Begin & complete my property renovations

I realised that with those very big and consuming priorities, there was no space left to do the business growth of my agency that I wanted to do.

This was (and still is) a pretty confronting revelation.

I also realised that lugging around the mindset of "I should be doing business development" had resulted in short, sporadic efforts which bore little fruit and drained focus away from other areas.

So I made the decision at the start of this year that focusing on growing my business is not a priority for me for the next 6 months. I'll maintain current clients and take on leads that organically come my way, but I'm not prioritising growth.

And while this decision does come with waves of insecurity of "what if I never come back to hustling on my business", I am holding on to the knowledge that having some space from the agency work will spur new ideas and inspiration for my next moves as an entrepreneur.

Simultaneously, the focus on my chosen areas will allow me to smash my fractional work, the renos, and grow Business-Minded.

And once I am ready to place business growth back in the spotlight, you best believe it'll be full noise.

Action of the Week:

How can you maintain focus?

Selecting a focus area is one thing, but sticking to your guns is another.

Here are the steps that I'm implementing to stick to my focus:

1. Getting clear on my focus It's hard to stick to something if you don't know exactly what you're prioritising. Get crystal clear so that when new ideas or opportunities come your way, you can ask yourself "does this align with my focus area?"

2. Colour coded calendaring Put everything in a calendar and colour code it – meetings, social catchups, family catchups or calls, workouts, networking events etc. This helps you see just how full your week is, and what the balance of colours is.

3. One in, one out If something new comes my way, I offload something else. The question then becomes "if I am saying yes to this, what am I then saying no to?" Having a detailed calendar mentioned above makes this quite a visual exercise.

4. Reminding myself I am running my own race A big part of me feels very uncomfortable about not being crystal clear on my next steps business-wise, especially when every time I go on LinkedIn I see another 22-year-old launching a multibillion-dollar business.

A big part of maintaining focus is remembering I am in a race with nobody, and trusting the process will get me where I want to go faster than desperately changing plans every three days.

Inspo & Recommendations:

LinkedIn post: “Why most lead magnets don’t generate real leads” by Nazar Dziadyk

Podcast ep: What all the best meeting leaders have in common by How I Work

Learning: How I Make the Toughest Decisions by Barak Obama.

Money: Don’t spend in order to keep up an appearance. Just because someone looks rich doesn’t mean they are. Listen to this podcast for more of a deep dive on this topic.

Love from your business-minded friend,

Elise