A Total Productivity System To Achieve More By Doing Less.
Free To Focus
Free to Focus is a productivity and time management book that offers insights and principles to help individuals maximize their effectiveness and achieve their goals.
Video Resources:
A 4 minute summary of Free to Focus.
A 46 minute talk about ALL the ideas of Free to Focus.
Book Synopsis
Here are some key ideas and principles from the book:
The Freedom Compass: Hyatt introduces the Freedom Compass, a tool to help individuals assess and align their actions with their goals. The compass includes three points: desire, inspiration, and permission.
The Productivity Pyramid: The book presents the Productivity Pyramid, a framework for organizing tasks based on their impact. It consists of three levels: desire, discipline, and distraction.
Ideal Week: Hyatt encourages readers to design their ideal week by allocating time to their most important tasks and responsibilities. This helps in prioritizing and focusing on what truly matters.
The Double Win: Hyatt promotes the concept of the Double Win, which emphasizes achieving success not only in one's professional life but also in personal life. Balancing work and personal priorities leads to a more fulfilling and well-rounded life.
Daily Rituals: Establishing daily rituals helps in creating a consistent and structured routine. This can include morning routines, focused work sessions, and intentional breaks.
Strategic Quarterly Offsite: Taking time for a quarterly offsite helps individuals reflect on their progress, reassess goals, and make necessary adjustments to stay on track.
The Weekly Preview: Conducting a weekly review and planning session ensures that individuals are aware of their upcoming commitments, have a clear understanding of their priorities, and can make informed decisions about their time.
Eliminate, Automate, Delegate: Hyatt introduces the concept of evaluating tasks and responsibilities based on whether they can be eliminated, automated, or delegated. This helps in focusing on high-value activities.
Margin: Creating margin in one's schedule is essential for dealing with unexpected events and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Overcommitting leads to burnout and reduced effectiveness.
Energy Management: Hyatt emphasizes the importance of managing energy, not just time. Understanding personal energy cycles and focusing on tasks when energy levels are highest can significantly improve productivity.
These principles from "Free to Focus" are designed to help individuals prioritize, focus on what matters most, and achieve a greater sense of balance and fulfillment in both their professional and personal lives.
Book Synopsis
“What will your life have been, in the end, but the sum total of everything you spent it focusing on?”
“Later I realized focusing on everything means focusing on nothing. It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything significant when you’re racing through an endless litany of tasks and emergencies. And yet this is how many of us spend our days, weeks, months, years-sometimes, our entire lives.”
“In fact, in a world where information is freely available, focus becomes one of the most valuable commodities in the workplace.”
“We’ve all experienced it. Our devices, apps, and tools make us think we’re saving time, being hyper-productive. In reality most of us just jam our day with the buzz and grind of low-value activity. We don’t invest our time in big and important projects. Instead, we’re tyrannized by tiny tasks. One pair of workplace consultants found ‘about half the work that people do fails to advance [their] organizations’ strategies.’ In other words, half the effort and hours invested produce no positive results for the business.”
“We’re doing more and gaining less, which leaves us with a huge gap between what we want to achieve and what we actually accomplish. The dollar value on lost productivity does matter, but it’s not what really hurts. It’s all the dreams left unexplored, the talents left untried, the goals left unpursued.”
“This kind of running creates costs of its own. Not only does it directly contribute to the feeling of unrelenting stress, but long work hours deprive our health, relationships, and personal pursuits of the kind of time they deserve. Hustle into the evening, and your sleep suffers. Leave early for the office, and you skip your morning run. Check email at your kids’ soccer game, and you miss the game-winning play. Catch up on a presentation, and you must reschedule that date with your spouse…again.”
“For now it’s enough to say, the important question is not, Can I do this job faster, easier, and cheaper? It’s, Should I be doing this job at all?”
“Pursuing the vague notion of success in and of itself can lead us into trouble. The problem is, most of us have never stopped to define what success means.”
“True productivity is about doing more of what is in your Desire Zone(what you both enjoy and are good at) and less of everything else.”
“The biggest obstacle in our efforts to become productive may very well be our mindset. We don’t intend for this to happen, but our lives become driven by a collection of beliefs we have about ourselves and our situation. These are limiting beliefs, because they limit our potential and establish false, constricting boundaries that prevent us from accomplishing bigger and better things.”
“Personal energy is a renewable resource, replenished by seven basic practices. We must:
Sleep
Eat
Move
Connect
Play
Reflect
Unplug”
“Yes and no are the two most powerful words in productivity. However, we must recognize there is always a trade-off baked into each one. As we saw above, every time we say yes to one thing, we’re saying no to something else.”
“You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy back your time by offloading tasks you deem stressful or unlikeable-and that amounts to the same thing. Delegation boosts well-being by reducing our number of stressful, disliked tasks, and by helping us regain a sense of control over our schedules.”
“Great days don’t just happen; they are caused.”