The Big Yes, Focus and Squirrels

Lately, the notions of "having a bigger yes that permits you to say to no to other things" and "focused intensity" have been on my mind.

The Bigger Yes

The basic idea here is that you have some compelling big thing that you are saying yes to in your life.  This permits you to say no to other things.  An example would be that students will choose to say no to some activities because they are saying yes to their education.

Focused Intensity

There is the notion of living a life in balance.  There is another of focused intensity.  Mastery and the exceptional are more often associated with focused intensity than balance in all things.

I was doing some research on focused intensity and came across this blog post:

http://mistakemaker.com/2009/11/23/momentum-lessons-from-a-spray-bottle-and-a-4-year-old/  With an interesting formula/idea from Dave Ramsey.  And in a round about way led me here: http://lci.typepad.com/leaders_resourcing_leader/2010/01/my-entry-2.html

I took/thought about the formula in the first and noted that dividing by time (over time) was totally incorrect.  The last post is better.  However, it still seemed a bit off to me.  So, I revised the equation as a summation and added a target set of goals for focused intensity.  I don't think the result is momentum.  To me the result would be the achievement of a goal. 

The Squirrel Diverter

Once upon a time I read about an idea to create a specific to you web page and set that as your start page.  The basic notion is to  redirect yourself away from the squirrel that had grabbed your attention.  Here is Merlin Mann's page: http://www.merlinmann.com/rightnow/

With out too much effort you can create your own default web page.  If you host it on your website and use Chrome with Google Sync it can be your default page everywhere!  Or simply save it as an HTML file on your machine and default to it.

The Result

So, thinking about the focused intensity formula, my big yes and the squirrel diverter, I created my own default page.  I used html so that I could list the most important goals and easily update them.  The end result can be seen here:

http://dbbear.com/focus.html

I would encourage you to think about your big YES and create your own focus intensifying start page.