Putting Our Focus On Trial

We are known for what we focus on—at least personally speaking. We spend time reading about, doing, acting and thinking on certain things; certain things get or have our attention.

Not all of this attentive time, though, reaps us the reward of value for effort. It helps us, long-term, to put our focus on trial; in order to ask, “What is this, or doing this, or focusing on this, returning to me and my life, in value?”

An Incisive Trial

As soon as we start asking such a question, on a regular basis, we begin to notice an opportunity; there is a lot of waste there that can be pruned.

Some things give us a little pleasure but they cost too much time, which crowds the important activities. Then there are those things we have to do but don’t necessarily want to do—no choice; we best get used to giving this area the attention it commands. Finally, there are things that serve no value and they only clutter our lives, like the e-mail subscriptions or social networking groups we’ve accumulated—those we hardly read or interact with.

Our focus can be split into those things that serve a need, those things we enjoy, and those things that are a plain waste of time; these latter things we need to strip clear.

An incisive trial, where we interrogate the various aspects of our focus, will reveal those things that add no value and no life.

An Uninvestigated Fact

Have you ever noticed that bulk mail (anything incoming and prevailing itself upon our focus) generally dissatisfies? It’s not addressed to us or our real focus and it misses the mark; it takes away from life. It would be better not even to look, not even to glance before clicking the delete button or, better still, to take a few seconds to patiently unsubscribe.

This is one of the reasons social networking is as much, still, a nemesis as it is true friend; there’s still so much distraction from the innate foci any one person has.

We may subconsciously wonder why we sit at our computers, embracing all the technology, and all the social media, and we are somehow still never more jaded, especially in hyper-stimulation.

Much of the focus invested in front of a computer screen, unless it is actually work, is a waste of time. We can play games and stalk our pages but in the end it won’t satisfy.

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Putting our focus on trial is evaluating where we put our time and effort; some of which may be wasted. Wasted time equals wasted effort and it takes us further from life satisfaction; further from joy. The more focused our lives are the more empowered, and happier, we will be.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.