Determining your Areas of Focus (AOF)

 

Your actions:

 

• Take 1 hour to look at your roles and responsibilities in your professional and personal life– what are you trying to achieve?

• Determine three professional and two personal AOF for the next 6 – 12 months

• Write them down, leave it a day or two and come back to them – do they still ‘ring true’?

 

The why:

 

You can be extremely busy but not actually achieve anything. Our definition of productive is 'meaningful work' so to start the process, you have to pause and take an aerial view.  You need to bring yourself up from the maze of everyday life to get the broader picture.

 

Questions to ask yourself are:

 

• What are the areas of importance in my life?

• What are my responsibilities in life (e.g. your job, family etc)?

• What am I trying to achieve in these areas?

• What does success look like in these areas?

 

David Allen in his book ‘Getting Things Done’ explains what an AOF is:

 

“Areas of Focus do not lend themselves as such to specific goals, but rather they serve as reminders and affirmations of activities that we simply want to be doing and thinking about more consistently.

 

In other words, the big reason for thinking about this level is to make sure our day-to-day activities are in balance and on track. When you keep backing up from here, you start to get into broader AOF not only on what you’re doing today, but project ahead into the future”.

 

Now think of the next 6 - 12 months (personally I go with 12 months as it give you enough time to really achieve good outcomes). What are the broad AOFs you need to concentrate on to achieve success? These are not goals, just top level guiding principles of things you are going to do because it’s not about getting everything done, it’s about getting the right things done.

 

For example. In his book the '18 Minutes to Find Your Focus and Master Distraction', Peter Bregman identified his areas of focus as:

 

1. Do great work with current clients

2. Attract future clients

3. Write and speak about my ideas

4. Be present with family and friends

5. Have fun and take care of myself

 

You might like to improve your education, you may want to revisit the purpose of your job and focus on the key drivers of success, you may want to do more in the community...your AOF will be unique to you.

 

Start with three professional and two personal areas of focus. Write them down and then come back to them later in the week. Do they still 'ring true'? Are your AOF going to help you achieve your end goal? If not, revise them until they do.

 

You'll be spending 85 - 90% of your time in your AOF. They will be the foundation, your map for organising your day-to-day activity.....which we'll be covering next week.

 

Let us know how you go!